BR 121 
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THE CHRISTIAN 
■ ^TASK— 

J. Harold DuBois 




Class I^F? iZ l 
Book 117 7 



Gpiglit'N?- 



coBoaBm DEFosir. 



THE CHRISTIAN TASK 



THE NEW GENERATION SERIES 

Something More — Kirby Page 

The Christian Task — J. Harold DuBois 

This series is being produced by a group of 
writers under thirty-five years of age, who may 
thus be regarded as members of the rising 
generation. 



THE CHRISTIAN TASK 

A Discussion of the Supreme Need 

of the Age: How Christianity 

Can Satisfy It 

J. HAROLD DU BOIS 




ASSOCIATION PRESS 

New York: 347 Madison Avbnub 
1920 






Copyright, 1920, by 

The International Committee of 

Young Men's Christian Associations, 



©CU571368 



D 



^1 HE author wishes to acknowledge his 
particular indebtedness to Professor 
William Adams Brown, of Union Theo- 
logical Seminary, whose teaching was the 
direct inspiration of this work. The present 
volume, in fact, is the outgrowth of a paper 
which was prepared and submitted in ful- 
fillment of the requirement in a course 
entitled "^ Theology for the New Age,^* 
which was given by Professor Brown at 
Union Theological Seminary during the 
first semester of the year igi8-igig. The 
author^s indebtedness to his teacher, how- 
ever, is much wider than this single course, 
and manifests itself in various phases and 
sections of his work. 



CONTENTS 

I. The Need Stated: The Need of a Task ... i 

II. The Need Analyzed: The Need and the Age 6 

1. A Big Task: A Restlessly Ambitious Age 

2. A Practical Task: A Practically Scientific Age 

3. A Constructive Task: A Positively Creative Age 

4. A Cooperative Task: An Age in Quest of Unity 

5. A Task for the Task's Sake: An Age in Quest of 

Happiness 

6. An Eternal Task: An Age in Quest of Security 

III. The Need Emphasized: The Need and the War. 23 

1 . The War as a Big Task 

2. The War as a Practical Task 

3. The War a Constructive Task, but Nevertheless Es- 

sentially Destructive in Character 

4. The War a Cooperative Task, but Nevertheless Es- 

sentially Competitive in Character 

5. The War as a Task for the Task's Sake, Involving a 

Tremendous Risk of Self, a Sacrificial Service of 
Others, and Abundant Joy 

6. The War as a Temporary Task: The Problem of 

Peace 

IV. The Need Satisfied: The Need and the Chris- 
tian Task of Establishing the Kingdom of God on 
Earth 51 

1. The Establishment of the Kingdom as a Big Task: 

A Call to Messiahship 

2. The Establishment of the Kingdom as a Practical 

Task: Jesus the Servant of Every Need, a Neglected 
Ideal 

3. The Establishment of the Kingdom as a Constructive 

Task: Catasfophe, a Dangerous Survival: The 
General Problem of Evil 



4- The Establishment of the Kingdom as a Cooperative 
Task: The Church a Fellowship of Workers, an 
Unrealized Ideal 

5, The Establishment of the Kingdom as a Task for 

the Task's Sake: God the Personal Ideal: The 
Kingdom of God the Social Ideal: Christ and His 
Church the Supreme Realizations of These Ideals: 
The Cross of Service and True Happiness or Salva- 
tion 

6. The Establishment of the Kingdom as an Eternal 

Task: Social and Personal Immortality: Security- 
Assured 

V. The Need Summarized: Christianity and Other 
Related Needs 83 

1. A Guide in Our Present Work: The Holy Spirit 

2. A History of Past Work: The Bible 

3. A Plan for Future Work: A Theology 



CHAPTER I 
THE NEED STATED: THE NEED OF A TASK 

The whole world seems to be conscious of the fact 
that the War has brought us to the threshold of a new 
age. The best of human understanding everywhere 
insists upon interpreting the momentous experience 
through which we have passed as being at once the death 
throes of an old civilization and the birth pangs of a new 
world order. All serious-minded men are aware of the 
fact that it is incumbent upon them to play some part 
in the new times which are at hand, and are eager to learn 
just what their particular relationship to the new age 
will and ought to be. It is realized that what we face 
are not new certainties, but new possibilities and op- 
portunities, and that whether or not these opportunities 
are to be utilized for the best depends upon us. A new 
age is at hand, but it waits to be seen what we shall make 
out of it. 

It is this combined element of certainty and uncertain- 
ty, of opportunity and responsibility, which tends to 
draw out the very best that is in us. Because of it we 
are not only constrained to prepare ourselves for the 
changes which are bound to come from the efforts of 
others, regardless of what our own individual attitudes 
toward the new age may be, but are encouraged to go to 
work to create out of these uncertainties the right kind 
of actualities. We feel that a double obligation rests 
upon us. We must work to create out of the new age a 

1 



The Christian Task 



better age, and we must prepare ourselves for the coming 
of this better age. Only in appearance, however, is the 
obligation dual. In fact it is single, for it is only through 
helping to bring in a better age that we can hope to prepare 
ourselves for its coming. We become true inheritors of 
the age by first being its benefactors. It is through 
giving all that we gain all. 

Consequently, the most important question which 
each of us must ask himself is. What can I do to serve 
the age in which I live? Or if the problem is the larger 
one — which we have set for ourselves — of the relation 
of Christianity to the new age, the question will be 
similar: What can Christianity do to serve the age 
which is at hand ? 

It is quite evident that in order to answer these and 
related questions it is necessary first to determine the 
needs of the age in which we live, for service is nothing 
other than the satisfying of needs. What some of these 
needs are it is by no means difficult to determine. Difficul- 
ty arises only when we attempt to distinguish between 
these needs, to classify them, to arrange them in the 
order of their importance, and to pick out those which 
seem to be basal. It is to this more difficult task that 
we have set ourselves. What we are to seek for is not all 
of the needs of the age. We want, if possible, to discover 
what is the supreme need of the age. 

The writer himself is thoroughly convinced that it is 
possible to discover a fundamental need of the age around 
which all other needs can be grouped, to which they can 
be subordinated, or upon which they must be erected. 



The Need Stated 



He does not hesitate to say at the very outset that in his 
opinion the supreme need of the age is the need of some- 
thing to do, the need of some gigantic undertaking — in 
a word, the need of a task, or in still simpler Anglo-Saxon, 
the need of a job. 

If the age were advertising its most important need, 
the writer feels strongly that its advertisement would 
not be that of a traveler in a strange land who desires 
a guide, or that of some irresponsible and helpless in- 
dividual who requires the services of a guardian, or that 
of an ambitionless idler who needs a counselor or manager, 
or that of a lonely old lady who seeks a companion, or 
that of a youth who wants a tutor, or even that of a 
successful business man whose increasing activities 
create a demand for more help. All of these advertise- 
ments suggest needs which are important, but no one of 
these needs by itself constitutes what could be termed the 
supreme need of the age. 

Still less would the age's advertisement take the 
form — as some would have us believe — of a notice of 
bankruptcy. The world, during the past four years, 
has been pretty roughly handled. Its ordinary business 
has been disrupted. It has been visited by a calamity 
which has been terribly destructive of its goods and its 
life. But it is still a good deal more than a dreary cemetery 
or a pile of junk. It is a long way from being bankrupt, 
either spiritually or materially. Its assets still exceed its 
liabilities. It does not propose to go into the receiver's 
hands, to close its doors after selling out its damaged goods 
at a monster war-sale, or to hang up the sign "Under 



The Christian Task 



New Management." While alterations are being made, 
it is going to continue to do business at the old stand, under 
the old name, on a grander scale. 

There are others who would have us believe that what 
the age stands most in need of is the rest-cure. They 
picture the race as having had its energy and spirit 
exhausted by the experience of the War. Blinded, gassed, 
and suffering from shell-shock, it struggles along, a 
nervous wreck on crutches, its whole thought centered on 
wheel-chairs, nurses, doctors, hospitals, sanitariums, or 
quiet secluded resorts. But the truth of the matter is 
that mankind, on the whole, has emerged from the recent 
conflict with its spirit awakened rather than dimmed, its 
energy increased rather than destroyed. To be sure, 
it exhibits the fresh wounds of battle; it wears bandages 
which are soaked in its warm life's blood; it is battered, 
and scratched, and torn, and mangled; but these mis- 
fortunes are overlooked in the excitement and joy of 
service and accomplishment. 

The spirit of the race, indeed, is that of the dough-boy 
who is pictured on the well-known liberty loan poster 
entitled, "And they said we couldn't fight." No doubt 
the dough-boy was as greatly surprised to discover his 
latent ability as were his enemies; but the picture suggests 
that in no sense is the dough-boy to be satisfied either with 
the discovery of this ability or with the use to which he 
has already put it. The determination to make added and 
real use of the newly discovered ability is prominent in 
the picture. It is a picture, not of an invalid, but of a 
crusader. 



The Need Stated 



And so It is with the race, which has been startled by 
a new consciousness of tremendous power to accomplish 
things. It has discovered its ability to fight; fight, in some 
way, it must. It hears the call, not of the idle resort, but 
of the battlefield. Work, not rest, is its insistent demand. 

No, if the age were to advertise its most important 
need, its advertisement would scarcely appear in the 
columns which deal with sanitariums and resorts, schools 
and colleges, bankruptcy sales, or help of various kinds 
wanted. It would appear in the column "Situations 
Wanted," and it would be the advertisement, not of any 
of the individuals to whom I referred above, but of a 
young man who has just completed a long, tedious, 
yet entirely successful course of training, and who 
yearns for a real opportunity to put his knowledge and 
skill to a supreme test. It would be an advertisement for 
a job. 

Geologists tell us that the earth has reached the 
period of decrepit old age; but there can be no doubt 
but that humanity has just celebrated the attainment of 
its majority. In a very real sense the race has just com- 
pleted its special period of discipline and training. It 
has graduated into early active middle life. So far as it is 
concerned, the coming age must be one of active service. 
In a thousand ways mankind is making known its desire 
for a task. 



CHAPTER II 

THE NEED ANALYZED: THE NEED AND THE 

AGE 

If the foregoing characterization of the age is correct, 
it is clearly evident that not any kind of a task will do. 
The newly initiated are usually most insistent upon their 
rights and most confident of their abilities. Untried skill 
is always most particular about the nature of the tasks 
to which it applies itself. It can afford to be so. Ambition 
will learn soon enough to walk warily. What the world 
needs to see is not a smaller but a larger display of this 
tendency of confident youth to be particular about the 
kind of service it performs. It will pay us, therefore, to 
search further to see just what kind of a task the age 
desires and needs. It is only as we uncover the successive 
points in an analysis of the kind of a task that the age 
needs that the full significance of our claim that the need 
of a task is the supreme need of the age will be disclosed. 

1. A Big Task: A Restlessly Ambitious Age 

The first quality which must be possessed by the task 
which will prove satisfactory to the new age is the more or 
less comprehensive characteristic which is adequately, 
although somewhat vaguely, described by the adjective 
"big." The primary demand of the age is for a big task. 
There is a very widespread feeling that long enough have 
we as individuals, as nations, as churches, as societies of 
one kind and another, engaged ourselves in the menial 

6 



The Need Analyzed 



tasks of catching fish and collecting taxes. Our ears are 
tuned for a call to a wider service. 

While we wait we are restless. Our age, in fact, is an 
age of unrest. This unrest permeates every department 
of our life. Evidences of political unrest, of religious 
unrest, of industrial unrest, are preeminent facts in our 
daily experience. They are facts which can be explained 
adequately only on the ground that our jobs are too small 
for us. We are conscious of individual and corporate 
capacities which our tasks have not begun to fathom. 
We feel that we have an infinite reserve of capability 
upon which we have not yet begun to draw. We are no 
longer content to be maggots. The restrictions of the 
past, even though they may have been protections, must 
be cast off; our freedom must be exercised. Responsibility 
is what we crave. Give us that and inspiration will not be 
lacking. 

If for any reason we are compelled to continue at 
menial and mechanical tasks, which hitherto have been 
entirely devoid of wide meaning or significance, we now 
insist that we at least be made to realize the bearing of our 
work upon the larger work which we make possible. It 
may not be for all of us to accomplish big things, but we 
can be satisfied with no less than the consciousness that 
what we do constitutes a direct and necessary contribution 
to world need. 

No wonder the age is restless, for a consciousness of 
infinite capacity for service is breaking upon the mind of 
humanity. The mustard seed of faith is finally germinating : 
mountains must be moved. 



The Christian Task 



2. A Practical Task: A Practically Scientific 
Age 

This is a practical age as well as an age of unrest, and 
the demand of the age is for a practical as well as a big task. 
By a practical task I mean, in part, a task which recognizes 
that men have other than spiritual needs. There are 
mental needs, physical needs, and industrial needs, which 
beg as persistently and justly for satisfaction as do spiritual 
needs. If we ignore the former, we can never hope to meet 
the latter satisfactorily. All of these needs are closely 
related. No single kind of need can be isolated from the 
remainder and overcome in isolation. To be overcome 
successfully, human need must be attacked at the several 
points at which it discloses itself. 

I have spoken as though we have been at fault in 
this connection, and as though our error has always taken 
the form of an over-emphasis upon spiritual needs. This 
is not wholly the case; but it is true that the Church, 
which has rightly conceived of its province as being 
chiefly that of the spirit, has perhaps been the chief offend- 
er in this connection, and its error has consisted in this 
failure to see the close connection between the spirit and 
the other phases of man's nature. It is the Church which, 
when there has been a demand for bread, has been most 
prone to change the subject to a consideration of the 
theory of the Church and of the rock upon which it was 
founded. It is the Church which, when a request has been 
made for fish, has been most likely to substitute an un- 
nourishing disputation on original sin and the serpent 
in the garden. But the error does sometimes take the 



The Need Analyzed 



form of an over-emphasis upon one or another of the 
other kinds of need. In such cases the violation of the 
requirement of a practical task is even more serious, for 
it is true that the ultimate purpose of man must be 
spiritual, and to a certain extent, therefore, the extra 
emphasis which the Church has been prone to put upon 
spiritual needs can be justified. Justice, however, cannot 
be satisfied if the related needs are to any degree ignored. 
They may be subordinated, but they must not be neglected. 

The age demands a practical task by insisting that 
proper consideration be paid to needs of every kind. It 
demands that human need be studied and approached 
scientifically — a demand which is a natural result of the 
fact that the age is at once a scientific and a practical age. 

The new age will not be satisfied with a job of peddling 
milk, unless this task is seen to be closely related to other 
than the physical needs of man. The age will not accept a 
teaching position, unless this vocation is viewed in its 
wider ramifications. This age could never be constrained 
to undertake the task of organizing labor, unless the 
bearing of better working conditions upon the higher 
phases of man's life is made apparent. Much less could 
the present. age ever be inveigled into accepting a job of 
distributing evangelical leaflets or of performing any of 
the other less practical tasks which are so numerous in the 
religious field. The former tasks, taken in themselves, 
are practical in a sense which is in no way true of the 
latter. But it is only when they are viewed in their wider 
relations that the best of these tasks become practical 
in the scientific sense which is demanded by the new age. 



10 The Christian Task 

The age demands a task of the widest social, educational, 
political, industrial, ethical, and religious reform, which 
aims at the development of a more perfect environment 
and a higher type of personal character. It is an age 
which prefers to say, "Arise, and take up thy bed, and 
walk** rather than to say, "Thy sins be forgiven thee." 

3. A Constructive Task: A Positively Creative Age 

It is necessary, in the third place, that the task to 
which the new age can devote itself wholeheartedly 
should be in the highest and fullest sense constructive. 
In the light of the recent world-situation this need for 
constructive activity is so obvious and its meaning so 
clear that lengthy illustration and discussion of the 
point are not necessary. 

As we indicated above, the race heretofore has been 
in a special period of training which has actually, if not 
necessarily, involved a large amount of activity which has 
been to a considerable extent of a destructive nature. 
Owing to the fact that its training and experience were 
yet incomplete, the race has erred or fallen short of per- 
fection in its application of principles and has lapsed 
into attitudes and activities which have not furthered its 
highest interests. 

These errors have taken a multitude of different forms. 
They have disclosed themselves, in the field of industry, 
in the form of boycotts, lockouts, strikes, sabotage, and 
unlimited competition. Natural resources have been 
squandered. Wide sections of country have been ruthlessly 
deforested and rivers have been polluted, and the health 



The Need Analyzed 11 

and well-being of thousands thereby endangered. The 
national ideal has been that of struggle, of isolation and 
self-sufficiency. Delinquents have been punished, im- 
prisoned, and destroyed. Criticism of all kinds has 
tended to be destructive. We have laid emphasis upon 
what we do not believe. In the field of morals we have 
stressed the "shalt nots." 

But it is a cardinal element in the faith of the new age 
that this special period of training has come to a close with 
the greatest destructive act that the human race has ever 
perpetrated — that the negative destructive principle 
has spent its all and failed in one gigantic final attempt 
to justify itself. To be sure, mankind has yet much to 
learn. Its entire life must, in a real sense, be one long 
course of training. But faith insists that in another sense, 
which is no less real, the special period of training is over 
and a special period of constructive application is at hand. 

The new age is a positively creative age. It is entirely 
out of sympathy with the passive and negative attitudes 
which have been prominent heretofore. It insists upon 
the positive, constructive attitude which displays itself 
in projects of reclaiming arid and swamp lands, of con- 
serving natural resources of one kind or another, of 
improving waterways and harbors, of promoting trade and 
intercourse, of constructing railroads, bridges, and canals. 
Class rivalries and antagonisms are to be eliminated 
through promoting justice. Sin, sickness, and crime 
are to be prevented by improving environmental con- 
ditions of all kinds. The criminal is to be regarded as an 
object of reformation rather than condemnation. In short, 



12 The Christian Task 

the new age is an age, not in which evil can be passively- 
submitted to, not in which evil is to be overcome with evil, 
but in which good must be done regardless of whether or 
not evil is present. 

The race has spent its allotted time in slavery in Egypt 
and in wandering in the wilderness. The time is now 
ripe for the seizing of the promised land and the building 
of the new Jerusalem. The new age demands a construc- 
tive task worthy of the true and abundant faith which 
did not shrink from saying, "Destroy this temple, and 
in three days I will raise it up." What the new age says 
IS, "Destroy a civilization, and in half the time which it 
takes you to destroy it, I will rebuild upon its ruins a 
newer and fairer world order." 

4. A Cooperative Task: An Age in Quest of Unity 

We have already suggested the next characteristic 
which must be possessed by the task which will prove 
satisfactory to the new age, in indicating that the time 
has come when the competitive principle must give way 
to the cooperative. The new age is a cooperative age, an 
age in quest of unity. Mankind thrills with a new sense 
of solidarity, and demands a task which will require men 
to work together in the interests of a common end. 

Here again we have a characteristic whose very patency 
is its sufficient proof. Evidences of a developing con- 
sciousness of social solidarity appear on every hand. The 
servant problem and the whole problem of the serious 
trend of population from the country to the city are but 
two of many contexts in which this tendency discloses 



The Need Analyzed 13 

itself in simple and individual forms, for, to whatever 
else they may be partly due, it is certain that these and 
similar problems owe their existence to an important 
degree to a widespread dislike to work alone, to an almost 
universal demand for fellowship with others. The average 
girl worker prefers an irksome, dirty, mechanical, ill- 
paying factory job, which provides her with the opportun- 
ity for frequent or continual intercourse with her friends, 
to any position, no matter what other advantages it may 
possess, which denies to her this privilege. The ordinary 
laborer will turn down a job as a farm hand, which 
promises him a good living and a fair wage but denies him 
social intercourse, for a gang job, which suflFers in com- 
parison with the other position at every point except 
that of the privilege of companionship. Of all evils, it is 
of loneliness that men are most shy. To be alone is least 
to be endured. Individuals will sacrifice much for the 
sake of having companions. They want them, they need 
them, in their work as well as in their play. 

This growing consciousness of kind and this demand 
for fellowship, this tendency to cooperate and unite with 
others, discloses itself as variously and strikingly in other 
realms of life than the individual. In the field of industry 
we discover, on the one hand, the important trend toward 
unity of ownership and of management and toward 
employers' associations of one kind and another, and, 
on the other hand, the prodigious phenomenon of organ- 
ized labor. The woman movement is a similar mani- 
festation in the more strictly political field. Even the 
churches are beginning to lay greater stress upon the 



14 The Christian Task 

catholic principle of unity in essentials and to manifest a 
willingness, if not yet an active desire, to work together for 
certain common ends. And the final and most patent 
fact of all is the inspiring world-wide tendency toward 
internationalism. Even the nations of the world are 
beginning to see the need and to manifest a desire to work 
together for the accomplishment of certain common tasks. 

The demand of the age for a job which will require 
men to work together for the attainment of common 
ends is thus due partly to a renewed consciousness of 
social solidarity — a consciousness which was active in 
an earlier stage of human history, but which had become 
more or less dulled in an age of individualism. This 
requirement, therefore, more than any of the other require- 
ments we have thus far considered, is due to a resuscitation 
of a primitive element in man's makeup. The task which 
will prove satisfactory for the new age must be a task 
which will permit men to work together, for the con- 
sciousness of solidarity inherent in men of the present age 
demands it. 

But there is a second element in this requirement 
which is not covered by the foregoing explanation. Primi- 
tive solidarity and cooperation were due largely to a sense 
of individual impotence, as it related to the negative 
desire to protect oneself. The present-day demand for 
cooperation finds its chief source elsewhere. It is not due 
to the individual sense of lack of power for ordinary needs. 
Rather it is due to the individual sense of insufficient 
power to accomplish alone the great task which the 
individual need not undertake, but nevertheless desires 



The Need Analyzed 15 

to tackle. It is in no sense due to the fact that man cannot 
possibly get along by himself, for in present-day society it 
is a fact that, to a large extent, he can. It is due rather 
to the fact that the present age insists on setting itself to 
the accomplishment of a big, practical, constructive task — 
a task of such a nature that it cannot possibly be success- 
fully accomplished unless all men cooperate in its interests. 
In other words, in demanding a big task, the age necessarily 
demands a cooperative task. 

The requirement of a cooperative task, therefore, is 
due to a double necessity, an inner necessity in the form 
of an inherent and universal desire on the part of man for 
fellowship with his kind, and an outer necessity in the 
form of a need of accomplishing successfully the kind of a 
task which the age demands. There is active in the race 
a sense of unity which demands a cooperative task. There 
is in the world a need for a greater sense of unity, which 
can be created only through cooperative labor. In seeking 
a cooperative task, the new age seeks to satisfy an already 
existing sense of unity and to develop a greater sense of 
unity. Its desire for a cooperative task is, indeed, a 
prayer that the unity which already partly exists may be 
made perfect. 

5. A Task for the Task's Sake: An Age in Quest of 
Happiness 

The task which will satisfy the demand of the new 
age can be described further by adding that it must be a 
task which can be undertaken for its own sake. I mean 
by this that the task for the new age must possess the 



16 The Christian Task 

qualities which will justify making its performance the 
ultimate end of existence. Mankind has had enough of 
mixed purposes and multiple allegiances. It has wearied 
of reward-hunting and self-seeking. It has wandered 
aimlessly through a maze of preoccupations and entangle- 
ments until it is frantic. The need of a single main purpose 
in life has begun to be realized. A search is on for a task 
which can command the undivided allegiance, the un- 
limited interest, the unstinted effort, of an entire race. A 
big, practical, constructive, cooperative task is wanted. 
The race is not going to work to save its respectability. 
The race is not going to work to gain a living, or for any 
other reason. The new age wants work for work's sake. 
It wants a task to the direct performance of which every 
other activity must be subordinated. 

Work for work's sake, however, does not require the 
absolute elimination of all other motives. It does not, 
for instance, exclude the consciousness of the effect of our 
work upon others. This is because of the fact that the 
work which takes the form of service of others is the 
only form of work which the new age will recognize. 
Service and work are synonyms in the terminology of the 
new age. The direct effects produced In others by our 
service of them are Integral parts of the final effects which 
we wish to bring about through our labor. These effects, 
however, are of primary concern only as they are viewed 
in their bearing upon the race as a whole and upon the 
whole task which Is being pursued. When considered In 
their bearing upon the individuals in whom they are 
produced, they are of distinctly secondary concern. In 



The Need Analyzed 17 

both cases the effects are the same. It is merely that the 
same effects have a greater value and wider significance 
when viewed in their relation to the whole than when 
viewed in their relation to a part. 

The relation of the individual to the race is not that of 
means to end, or vice versa. The relationship is simply 
that of a part to the whole. The individual and the race 
are two inseparable phases of the same thing. The realiza- 
tion of one is bound up with the realization of the other. A 
consciousness of the effect of our services upon others is 
permissible, but only because of the identity of these 
effects with the effects produced by the same services 
upon the race. Our final reason for performing every 
service must be its effect upon the race. The service of 
other individuals for their own sakes is usually called 
altruism. The new age demands a higher form of altruism 
in the service of others for the sake of the race. It is 
altruistic in the highest sense. It wants to serve all for 
the sake of all. 

But while work for work's sake not only permits but 
requires altruism of the highest form, it excludes every 
form of selfishness. If it did not, it could not satisfy the 
new age, for this age demands a task which requires self- 
forgetfulness. The men of this age desire continually to 
risk themselves. This is not to say, however, that work 
for work's sake excludes the consciousness of the effect 
of our work upon ourselves. The service of others for the 
sake of the race necessarily produces its effects in the life of 
the servant as well as in the lives of those who are served. 
These effects, as in the former case, are effects for the 



18 The Christian Task 

race as well as for the individual who performed the 
services, and because of this identity the consciousness 
that they are effects in his life is permitted to the servant. 

The consciousness of reflex effects of one's work upon 
oneself, however, must be subordinated, not only to one's 
consciousness of the effects of his work upon the race as a 
whole, but also to one's consciousness of the effects of 
his work upon the particular individuals whom he serves. 
In other words, in spite of the fact that the two sets of 
effects have an equally direct and important bearing upon 
the race as a whole, the laws of moral activity require 
that the effects produced by our own moral actions in 
our own lives, viewed either from the individual or the 
racial standpoint, ought to be subordinate in our minds 
to the effects produced by our moral actions in the lives 
of others. It is, moreover, more important that we should 
always think of ourselves as members of the race than that 
we should always regard others in the same light. Success- 
ful moral action requires that, so far as we are able, we 
should regard the whole race, with the exception of our- 
selves, as the object of our services. The thought of other 
individuals than ourselves should influence our acts only 
secondarily. Ourselves as members of the race should 
be of least concern to us. Thought of ourselves as in- 
dividuals should be entirely eliminated. 

In demanding a task which can be prosecuted for its 
own sake, it is seen that the new age makes room for the 
exercise of a lofty form of altruism and of what might be 
called personalism — using person to refer to the unit 
of the race in its social rather than individual aspect. 



The Need Analyzed 19 

Individualism, however, as it is usually understood, is 
eliminated. 

But work for work's sake, while allowing for altruism, 
transcends it. The weakness of altruism lies in the fact 
that it takes it for granted that the effects produced by- 
work have an existence and permanence apart from the 
acts which produced them. This is not the case. The most 
real effects produced by moral action are the personal 
happiness derived directly from its performance and the 
ability to perform greater moral acts. If this ability is not 
made use of in the performance of the works which it makes 
possible, it is soon lost. If moral activity ceases, the joy 
of service immediately flees. There is a constant necessity, 
therefore, for permanent moral activity. When this is 
once realized, it is soon seen that it is eternal work, rather 
than the changing and transient effects produced by work, 
which is of supreme importance and lasting significance. 
For all practical purposes, service becomes an end in itself. 
Instead of merely the means of salvation, service becomes 
in a real sense salvation itself. We learn to work for work's 
sake. It is work for work's sake that the age needs. 

Prophetic words, spoken recently by that shrewd, 
far-seeing statesman of France, Clemenceau, bear power- 
ful testimony to the truth of our contention. "It is in 
work, and in work alone," so runs his interesting pro- 
nouncement, "that the world, emerging from social and 
economic chaos, shall find its salvation. Let us work!" 
— ^words which have been given beautiful symbolical rep- 
resentation in the striking poster by the young French 
artistj^G. G. Gamer, entitled, "After Victory, to Work." 



20 The Christian Task 

6. An Eternal Task: An Age in Quest of Security 

The final characteristic which must be possessed by 
the task which the new age seeks is a direct development 
from the idea of the eternality of work. If service is 
absolutely essential to existence and progress, if it is 
salvation itself, it stands to reason that the task to which 
the new age desires to set itself, cannot, from the very 
nature of the case, be a task entirely capable of accomplish- 
ment. The new age must find an eternal task, a task which 
can never play out; else it cannot be sure but that service 
may sometime come to an end and salvation be lost. 

The age does not for a moment seek security in any 
absolute sense. It desires rather that the search for 
salvation should involve a large element of personal 
responsibility and risk. It does not want to feel sure that 
it is going to be saved completely and finally; but it does 
desire that feeling of deepest joy which indicates that it is 
being saved, and the assurance that eternal happiness is 
possible. It desires, in other words, a task which is capable 
of calling forth the highest moral activity now and forever. 

Eternal happiness, however, hinges not only upon the 
possibility of eternal work, but also upon the possibility 
of forever being in a position which will allow of our en- 
gaging in that work. There must be an eternal element 
in us as well as in our task, if salvation of the kind which 
we have been discussing is to last forever. 

It is possible and, from one point of view, perhaps 
necessary to think that the race will come to an end in due 
time; but from the practical standpoint, which must 



The Need Analyzed 21 

always control, it is not difficult to discover an eternal 
element in the race and consequently to believe in the 
possibility of its eternal activity. But with the individual 
it is different. Whether or not the individual will forever 
be in a position which will enable him to be eternally 
active is not so clear to us. Death is a mysterious ex- 
perience in the life of every individual, which has no 
apparent counterpart in the life of the race. However, to 
all who have caught the true spirit of the attitude which 
we have been describing as typical of the present age, it 
seems practically necessary that the individual whose life 
on earth is characterized by a steady progress in moral 
activity and the joyful experience of ever-increasing 
salvation will, after death, continue to exist in some 
higher form which will permit of endless progress along 
the same lines. So great is the love of service in the new 
age, so great is the importance attached to it and the 
happiness derived from it, that an earnest hope of personal 
immortality becomes absolutely necessary. 

And it might be added that for those who, for one 
reason or another, have been denied the happy experience 
of present salvation the need is the same, although it 
probably is not recognized to be so. The desire for eternal 
rest has often been the source of the hope of immortality, 
but what the child cut off in immaturity and the over- 
burdened workingman need is not rest, but eternal work 
of the right kind, under the right conditions. 

The spirit of the new age allows no room for retirement 
either in this life or the life to come. The new age demands 
eternal work. It prefers individual annihilation to a 



22 The Christian Task 

heaven which cannot satisfy this demand, for any other 
kind of a heaven than a heaven of work would, for the 
representative citizen of the new age, be a veritable hell. 
The new age is on a search for a task which will insure 
both the individual and the race against the coming of 
that night when no man can work, or when work shall be 
no more. 



CHAPTER III 

THE NEED EMPHASIZED: THE NEED AND THE 

WAR 

Now that we have described in detail the kind of a 
task the age needs, I believe that any who may have 
found it difficult to agree with our opening claim will be 
ready to agree that the need of a task is the supreme need 
of the age, and that if Christianity meets this need it will 
perform for the race a service of a magnitude and im- 
portance which will justify its being regarded as the 
salvation of the world. At this point, however, some 
may be inclined to say: Yes, the age needs just such a 
task as has been described; but is the age conscious of 
this need? Is there not, in other words, a preliminary 
need of awakening the age to a lively consciousness of 
this need of a task? 

To a very large extent the answer to this question was 
implicit in the preceding discussion. That the age is 
already acutely sensitive to the need of a task is so truly 
a fact that it was impossible to prevent this fact from 
being constantly reflected in our description of the kind 
of a task the age needs. It was impossible to speak always 
of "what the age needs." We had often to refer to "what 
the age wants," "what the age seeks," "what the age 
desires," "what the age demands." Our illustrations 
were necessarily drawn, in large part, from already 
prevailing tendencies toward the ideal which we were 
describing rather than from opposing tendencies which 

23 



24 The Christian Task 

need to be overcome. The very nature of the present 
situation required that our emphasis throughout our 
preceding discussion be largely positive rather than 
negative. We necessarily gave constant evidence in 
support of the fact that the need we were describing is a 
need which is already felt acutely. 

Our principal proof of this fact, however, was deliber- 
ately, although with considerable arbitrariness, reserved, 
in order that it might be presented as a whole in this 
place. What I refer to, of course, is the great experience 
of the War. The War, seen in its true light and taken in 
itself, is not only our finest, but a sufficient, piece of 
evidence in support of the fact that the age feels the need 
of a task acutely. The truth of this statement will be 
seen more clearly as we proceed to discuss the War in 
the light of the several requirements which we have 
pointed out as belonging to the ideal task. 

1. The War as a Big Task 

It was as a task, a big task, which embodied to a larger 
degree than any other single and definite undertaking 
of all time the various characteristics which we have 
attributed to the ideal task, that the War made its appeal 
to the world and won the efficient, whole-hearted, and 
sacrificial services of almost an entire race. It was a task 
which at least began to sound man's infinite capacity for 
service. It took men who were idling in dissipated un- 
employment; men also from colleges, offices, shops, and 
mines; managers from the biggest business enterprises 
in existence, and gave them real jobs. It took women 



The Need Emphasized 25 

out of society or left them in the home, and gave them 
big tasks which only the truly brave could bear. It 
snatched the masks off multitudes who were going about 
in various complete disguises and disclosed to the world 
heroes and heroines. The wondrous heroism and efficiency 
with which the gigantic feats and difficult tasks required 
by the War were performed will long be the marvel of the 
world. What these marvellous accomplishments were 
has been too widely advertised to require tabulation here. 

Some people prefer to think of war as being the 
national way of going on a drunken spree. It is certain, 
however, that this is not the main impression which one 
must get from the recent war. More than any other one 
thing the recent war impressed itself upon the mind of 
mankind as a big task. 

The fact that the world received the War with the 
same soberness with which a great task is undertaken is 
beautifully illustrated in Paul Sabatier's story of how the 
War came to France — an account which is of more 
general application than the author made it. This power- 
ful description of a concrete instance will do more than 
any abstract argument of mine to bring home the full 
meaning of my point, so I quote part of it. 

After setting forth in some detail the far from ideal 
situation which prevailed in France up to the time of the 
War, Sabatier describes the spirit in which war was 
received by his own immediate community, which he 
claimed to be fairly typical of France as a whole : 

"On Thursday the 30th of July, early in the morning, 
a few neighbors came to inform me that soldiers who had 



26 The Christian Task 

arrived on the evening of the day before, with three or 
four days' leave, had been recalled by telegram a few 
minutes after their arrival home. The newspapers re- 
ceived a little later said nothing of the measure; so that 
one wonderec if it was only of a local character. Yet it 
had spread alarm through our countryside. There was 
anger in certain houses. The military administration was 
criticized with a bitterness that was almost indignation. 
When I told my neighbors: Wait, it will all be explained; 
it wasn't done simply to annoy you,' they replied with the 
peculiar obstinacy of the countryman who is quite deter- 
mined not to alter his opinion. 

"On Saturday, the first of August, at five in the after- 
noon, the bell of the Catholic church of the neighboring 
village of St. Michel began to ring fast and loud. Men 
looked at one another with a constriction of the heart. 
Would this be the terrible news ? 

"They waited, not daring to speak. Two minutes 
perhaps elapsed. And people began to hope. But now 
the bell of the Protestant church also broke out into 
speech, mingling its discordant sounds with those of the 
other bell. Yet a glimmer of hope still remained to me. 
Who could tell? Perhaps a fire had broken out in the 
village! But no, there was no sign of smoke. It was war. 
It was indeed war. We were all gathered together, but we 
did not venture to look at one another. My son set out 
to obtain news from the nearest small town. The two 
bells did not cease ringing, as though they wanted to 
irritate the wound which their outburst had made in our 
hearts; and I gazed upon the vast horizon which is visible 
from my hermitage. The roads were as empty as before. 
'Have not our peasants understood ?' I thought, in anguish. 
But I soon saw that I had underrated them. The steam 
threshing-machines which were at work here and there 
all over the countryside were suddenly stopped. The 
workers, perched on the machines or on the stacks of 



The Need Emphasized 27 

straw, were gazing about them in every direction. Then I 
saw one who raised his hands to the heavens in a lofty 
gesture which I had never seen them make. Was it in 
prayer? Or was it something else.? 

"Then the rhythmical gestures of the great work of 
harvest were resumed. The engines began to pant once 
more, but in a strange human silence. Yet all night long 
the work never ceased. They wanted to finish it; to finish 
at all costs, in order to leave bread for the women and 
children. Yet all through that historic night no signal was 
heard from the engines. Our humble country-fold in- 
stinctively avoided the use of that piercing call; orders 
were given by signs, or under the breath. Was there not in 
this insignificant detail a singularly poetical trait of moral 
delicacy ? The voice of the tocsin, crying that the country 
was in danger, had imposed silence on all other voices. 

"Towards seven o'clock I went down into the village. 
It was almost deserted. The Catholic cure, the Protestant 
pastor, and the schoolmaster had shaken hands with their 
friends. The mayor, assisted by a gendarme who had 
already come in from some neighboring district, was 
pasting up the order of requisition. In the few women to 
be seen one was conscious of a great oppression, but also 
of a degree of calmness and of discipline which I should 
never have believed possible. This tiny village of St. 
Michel deChabrillanouxwasthe same as in 1870, yet what 
a contrast! It seemed to me that if what was happening 
there was no exception, France, if she was to perish, would 
at least perish beautifully. 

"At the usual hour each withdrew to his room, but no 
one thought of sleeping. Each one passed the night by his 
window, dreaming and reflecting. At dawn the flock of 
sheep from the neighboring farm set out for the pasture, 
and in their monotonous procession along the track there 
was more than a beneficent symbol of the life that con- 
tinues in spite of all. 



28 The Christian Task 

"The bells did not ring that morning. Did they think 
to keep silence until the day when they should win pardon 
for having rung in the war by announcing a Te Deum? 

"The two churches of the village were almost empty; 
and, what was better, so were the cabarets. The great day 
of mobilization for our district was Monday, the 3rd of 
August. On this Sunday there were a few isolated depart- 
ures, but no one knew of them, and I did not see them. On 
the following day I was cowardly. I should have liked to 
return to the village, to press the departing soldiers to my 
heart. My courage failed me. Still obsessed by the mem- 
ory of 1870, I feared, not scenes of emotion, but a display 
of distressing patriotism, cries of hatred, stupid boasts and 
threats, drinking songs alternating with and profaning our 
national anthems. I climbed a neighboring hill whence, 
with a pair of binoculars, one can plainly see what is 
happening on a number of the more important highways 
of the district. It was shortly after three o'clock that I 
first noticed, on the further side of a deep, narrow valley, 
something like a long, dark ribbon which seemed to move. 
Then suddenly the 'Marseillaise' burst forth, reverberated 
by all the echoes of the mountain, but there was something 
reserved and controlled about it; it had almost the accent 
of a psalm. Overcome by intense feeling, standing alone 
up there on the crest of the hill, I joined from afar in the 
song of our soldiers who were leaving for the front, until 
the moment when the turn of the road hid them from my 
sight. 

"The sun shone out, and on all the other highways 
other interminable processions were descending toward 
the railway stations with the same order, with the slow, 
heavy pace of our peasants when they set out for the days 
of sowing."^ 

'Paul Sabatier, "A Frenchman's Thoughts on the War,'* pp. 69-74. 



The Need Emphasized 29 



2. The War as a Practical Task 

The War appealed to the race not only as a big, but 
also as a practical, task. It was practical In the ordinary- 
sense in that It sought to satisfy certain primary and 
immediate needs. It was not an Invasion of the Holy 
Land, to wrest the sepulcher of Christ out of the hands of 
the infidels. It was not a wild-goose chase throughout 
the world in search of the Holy Grail or the fountain of 
youth. Its interests were really vital to the happiness of 
the race. It sought to preserve such Immediate values 
as physical life, property, honor, commercial advantage, 
and national security and Independence. It was the 
salvation of many who were hitherto employed in non- 
essential industries — it gave them practical and essential 
jobs. It represented a task of building fleets, of making 
ammunition, of floating huge loans; of carrying relief to 
starving millions; of renewing vast wasted areas; of 
rehabilitating the immense human wreckage of war; of 
constructing bridges, cantonments, docks, and railroads; 
of raising, training, equipping, transporting, and feeding 
armies. 

But still more important, the War was practical in 
that highest sense which is a characteristic of the ideal 
task, in that it directed itself to the satisfaction of a 
spiritual need to which the satisfaction of all other needs 
were subordinated. It was only as the War was waged 
in the interests chiefly of such spiritual values as justice, 
liberty, equality, truth, and democracy that it appealed 
to the best elements In mankind and proved itself a 



30 The Christian Task 

practical task of the kind which the race needs. The 
appeal to the United States to take a hand in the struggle 
fell, so long as it was based upon the argument of a 
threatened national and personal security, upon in- 
attentive ears; but when the appeal to self-interest was 
exchanged for the appeal to idealism, when the watchword 
"a world safe for democracy" was flung out, the nation, 
seizing upon this phrase as a battle-cry, sprang to arms. 
This change of appeal may have been, as many suspected, 
a ruse of the diplomats. It may be that some men, power- 
ful in the life and decision of the nation, who publicly 
subscribed to this idealism actually were controlled by 
material interests. Many things which have been said 
and done since the signing of the armistice have lent 
support to such a suspicion. But consolation for the 
present and promise for the future is to be found in the 
really important fact that the War made its chief appeal 
to the people of the United States as a practical task, 
involving a controlling spiritual end — a world safe for 
democracy — and that the people of the United States 
will never be satisfied, that true peace will never be 
secured, until this spiritual end shall have been attained. 
This conception of the War as being in the very 
highest sense a practical task is, of course, much wider 
than the United States. We will close our consideration 
of the point with a few words from a letter written August 
1, 1914, by a young French school teacher: 

"People should not keep on reminding me of 1870 
a propos of 1914; the situation is so different! In 1870 
many of the faults were on our side; our soldiers set out 



The Need Emphasized 31 

courageously in defense of their country. This time they 
have set out with the conviction that they are serving their 
country, no doubt, but they are still more serving the 
most sacred rights of humanity. No one can doubt as to 
the possible or probable issue of the conflict. The match 
is too unequal. . . .The struggle was always unequal 
between the tyrants and the liberators; and the liberators, 
in the end, have always been the victors. I wish I were a 
poet, so that I could write, before setting out, a master- 
piece dedicated to the Germans, thanking them for 
having brought back the age of the martyrs." ^ 

3. The War a Constructive Task, but Nevertheless 
Essentially Destructive in Character 

A still more striking fact is thiat the War did, to some 
extent, fulfill also the requirement of a constructive task. 
It is true that one of the most serious defects of the War as 
a task for the race was its large and serious destructive 
element. It involved an enormous destruction of life and 
property. Thirteen millions dead, twenty millions 
crippled, one million homes destroyed, and three hun- 
dred and thirty-eight billions in direct and indirect 
money loss represent a few of the items which appear 
upon the debit side of the balance sheet. The formid- 
able aspect which the War presents as a destructive 
agency has, in fact, caused many to feel certain that 
to justify the War on account of the good which 
resulted from it would be like praising a terribly de- 
structive earthquake because it shook the ashes out of 
one's grate. Others are inclined to confine the great loss 

iPaul Sabatier, "A Frenchman's Thoughts on the War," p. 30. 



32 The Christian Task 

strictly to material things and to discover a tremendous 
gain in spiritual values, and feel, consequently, just as 
certain that the ends gained entirely justify the cost. 
It is seriously to be questioned, however, whether a strict 
confinement of losses to material things and of gains to 
spiritual things is true to the facts of the case. However 
that may be, it remains that, no matter how large and 
invitingly the constructive results of the War loom up 
before us, few of us would desire a repetition of the 
experience. 

Nevertheless, the constructive effects of the War are 
facts which must not be overlooked. War furnishes a great 
stimulus to life. Every interest of man feels its penetrat- 
ing influence for good as well as for evil. It stirs art to 
new methods of interpretation and new modes of ex- 
pression. To politics it bequeaths new codes of law, new 
forms of government, and new ideas of the relation of 
individual to individual, of individual to group, and 
of group to group. In the field of industry it gives birth to 
new mechanical inventions, new scientific discoveries, 
new systems of cooperation between employe and em- 
ployer. Even religion, one of the most instinctive and 
conservative interests of man, is keenly sensitive to its 
presence. By war the concepts of religion are refilled, the 
principles of religion are reinterpreted, the hopes of 
religion are rekindled, the dogmas of religion are recon- 
structed, and the particular emphases of religion are 
renewed. War, in short, affords an opportunity for 
creating as well as for destroying. It was the creative 
element in the recent war that served as a powerful appeal 



The Need Emphasized z:^ 

to many. More than one soldier could have voiced the 
sentiment of the writer of the same letter quoted above: 

"I always used to picture to myself the atrocities of 
war, and now I see it as providing commonplace men like 
myself with the occasion, not so much of performing 
brillant actions as of dying in creating something, of 
which I am certain, although I see it incompletely. To 
fall under some pine-tree in the Vosges, to die without 
any knowing of it, appears to me as an act of life which 
cannot be in vain. Perhaps they will kill us all. They will 
murder France. Yet I cannot help believing that we are 
already victorious. " ^ 

4. The War a Cooperative Task, but Nevertheless 
Essentially Competitive in Character 

Furthermore, the War appealed to the race as a great 
opportunity for applying the cooperative principle. It 
compelled individuals to work side by side for the attain- 
ment of a common end. It took men from every walk of 
life, rich and poor, high and low born, educated and 
illiterate, of all creeds, classes, and colors, and dumped 
them into a common trench, fed them on a common fare, 
subjected them to a common discipline, gave them com- 
mon routine tasks, and instilled into them a common 
ideal. The War was indeed a great breeder of the truly 
democratic spirit, the essence of which is the desire to 
work together in a common task. 

It seems possible that even the Crown Prince of the 
nation which seemed to be least in sympathy with the 
democratic principle not only felt but may indeed have 

*Paul Sabatier, "A Frenchman's Thoughts on the War/* p. 31. 



34 The Christian Task 

been influenced by the cooperative, the potentially 
democratic, spirit which necessarily pervades camp life. 
In a recent interview he is reported to have made two 
statements which may possibly have had more than a 
casual connection. These two statements are: 

"I quit the army with the greatest regret after having 
participated in the trench life with the soldiers for so long." 

*' Should the German Government decide to form a 
republic similar to the United States or France, I should 
be perfectly content to return to Germany as a simple 
citizen ready to do anything to assist my country. I 
should even be happy to work as a laborer in a factory."^ 

To many persons these statements are merely the 
ran tings of a superior hypocrite; but all who truly appre- 
ciate the tremendous power in cooperative labor to produce 
real unity and democracy must feel inclined to ascribe 
to these statements the possibility of an element of 
sincerity. The War actually appealed to large numbers of 
individuals as an opportunity for cooperative labor. It 
actually produced in others, who were drawn into the 
War by other appeals, a true feeling for and appreciation 
of the democratic, the cooperative, spirit. 

What has been said of the relation of the War to 
individuals is true as well of its relation to the larger 
aggregations of individuals. The War produced not only 
a feeling of unity as between man and man, but also a 
closer bond between classes, races, sects, and nations. 
Even labor and capital, bitter rivals in the past, had their 
eyes opened to the truth of their real partnership. This 

iNew York Times, Dec. 4, 1918. 



The Need Emphasized 35 

fact has been manifested of late In a thousand ways, but 
nowhere more strikingly than in an industrial creed which, 
since the signing of the armistice, has been given to the 
world by one of its richest and most powerful industrial 
leaders. In practically all of the ten articles of which 
the creed is composed the idea of cooperation is present; 
in several, uppermost. In introducing the creed, its 
author, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., remarked: 

"One of the most useful lessons which the struggle has 
taught is the value of cooperation. Today we stand at the 
threshold of the period of reconstruction, and as we turn 
from the problems of war to the problems of peace we 
may look for such success in solving the latter as has been 
attained in dealing with the former only as we are ani- 
mated by the same spirit of cooperation and brotherhood. 
The hope of the future lies in the perpetuation of that 
spirit and its application to the grave problems which 
confront us nationally as well as internationally."^ 

It would be possible also to illustrate the War's influ- 
ence upon the development of the idea of cooperation as 
between races. It is sufficient, however, to note that 
since the War started and gave men of every complexion — 
white, red, brown, yellow, and black — a common task, 
there has been much less emphasis upon racial peculiarities 
and inferiorities, and much more willingness, first, to 
recognize that each race has its peculiar contribution 
to make to world life and civilization, and second, to 
assist each race to make its peculiar contribution. 

The inspiring way in which the various religions and 
religious sects have cooperated in performing a common 

^New York Times, Dec. 6, 1918. 



36 The Christian Task 

personal service to the men In the armies and navies is, 
moreover, a striking and sufficient proof of the effect of the 
War in the field of religion. The Young Men's and 
Young Women's Christian Associations are nothing other 
than great interdenominational Protestant institutions, 
and the wonderful service which they rendered during the 
War must be regarded as the result of the efficient and 
extensive cooperation of the various Protestant de- 
nominations. But cooperation was by no means limited 
to the Protestant churches. We witnessed, during the 
struggle, the inspiring sight of Jewish, Catholic, and 
Protestant organizations cooperating in the raising of 
funds and in other activities. Furthermore, we have the 
Federal Council of Churches and the various other 
interchurch and interdenominational war-time commissions 
and organizations as evidences of the effect of the War in 
the development of cooperation in the religious field. 

But It is probably In the national field that the power 
of the War to develop unity is most strikingly seen. Con- 
siderable had been done along the line of International 
cooperation before the War started. A cooperative spirit 
was present in the nations and longed for the opportunity 
to manifest itself more fully. The War provided an op- 
portunity, and a pooling of resources, power, interests, 
and ideals followed which has been the wonder of the 
world. It was the spectacle of nation fighting beside 
nation, not the spectacle of nation fighting against nation, 
that appealed to mankind. 

Shortly after the United States entered the War, the 
writer had the privilege of visiting Rio de Janeiro, and 



The Need Emphasized 37 

while there of witnessing, even in that distant city, in a 
country so far removed from the actual theater of the 
War, a great demonstration in celebration of the entrance 
of the United States into the War. The joy of cooperating 
in a common task was indeed felt throughout the world. 
In describing the joy of his little village over the news 
that England had joined France, Sabatier again illustrates 
a more general feeling. 

"Suddenly on the fifth of August a messenger reached 
the little village, shouting: ^England is coming in I 
England is coming in with usT Never have I seen so 
great a joy reflected on human faces. It did not find ex- 
pression in shouting or processions, but when people 
were assured that the news was really authentic, those 
who were present gazed at one another without speaking; 
they all had tears in their eyes. Finally an old man said: 
*I feel that I can breathe again,' and that phrase, in the 
local dialect, means that one can once more breathe 
freely, and that one feels once more that there is a reason 
for living. "^ 

To the fact that the War operated so extensively and 
prominently to create a need for cooperation and to 
satisfy the desire for it is due in large part the present 
fateful tendency in some circles to eulogize war; but all 
who represent this attitude forget that the recent war, 
like all war, was a competitive, even more than a coopera- 
tive, task. The War did give birth to an active spirit of 
cooperation, but it was itself born of the spirit of com- 
petition. The War did invite men and nations to cooperate, 
but it invited them to cooperate in competing against 

1 Paul Sabatier, "A Frenchman's Thoughts on the War," p. 35. 



3S The Christian Task 

other men and nations. It temporarily satisfied the need 
of cooperation, but, at the same time, it radically violated 
the principle of cooperation. Consequenth', the War must 
be interpreted as emphasizing both the great need of 
cooperation and its owii inherent inadequacy to meet that 
need pennanently and satisfactorily. The lesson which 
the War should teach us is that we must seek, not war 
as the satisfier of the need of cooperation, but cooperation 
as the permanent substitute for war. We should learn 
from this calamitous experience that war cannot be 
successful!}" eliminated, that true peace cannot be secured, 
unless men and nations be induced to cooperate in the 
performance of great definite constructive ser\'ices. 
Is this the clue which is being followed in the present 
search after a substitute for war? We often hear it said, 
for instance, that the recent war was a war against war, 
and that the League of Nations is the substitute which is 
to take the place of war; but if the principle which we have 
laid down is correct, it is plain that b\' no stretch of the 
imagination can the League of Nations, as pro\dded for 
in the present covenant, be regarded as a real substitute 
for war. The League of Nations can be regarded as a 
substitute for war only in so far as war is a means of 
settling disputes. The covenant of the League pro\4des 
for recourse to arbitration rather than war as a mode of 
settling disputes; but war, as we have seen, represents 
something more than a mode of settling disputes. War is 
not so much a mode of settling disputes as it is a way of 
gi\"ing expression to certain natural instincts and of 
satisfj-ing certain fundamental needs, namely the fighting 



The Need Emphasized 39 

instinct and the need of cooperation. The League of 
Nations seeks to prevent war by providing other means 
for settling disputes, but it fails to provide any other 
definite way of giving expression to this instinct and of 
satisfying this need. It provides the world with a new 
tool, but it outlines for the nations no definite, con- 
structive, cooperative task. It cannot, therefore, be 
regarded as representing or providing a substitute for war. 

"All our hopes of saving the world from a repetition 
of the unfathomable cataclysm of 1914,** writes Premier 
Lloyd George in the Manchester Guardian, "center upon 
our working out the principal means whereby the nations 
of the earth can conduct the common affairs of the world 
in friendly cooperation instead of jealous rivalry. The 
principle of the League of Nations has been accepted, 
but the League of Nations will prove fruitless if it is to be 
no more than a new piece of international organization. 
What matters is that the units which make up this 
organization shall be inspired by a real determination 
to work in close harmony together for the betterment and 
liberty of mankind. The nations must not let themselves 
believe that, having drawn up a paper constitution, the 
peace of the world has been made secure. If they allow 
themselves to be bemused by this policy they will only be 
reawakened by a new war. They have now to see that the 
League of Nations is made the effective instrument for 
the solution of every international problem." 

When I take my boys' club out to play baseball and a 
dispute over some matter arises, I do not blow my whistle, 
call the boys around me, and start to adjudicate the 
matter. No, I blow my whistle for attention and cry: 
"Play ball! Play ball!" I find that disagreements are 



40 The Christian Task 

most often only magnified by making them the subjects 
of discussion and arbitration — that they are best pre- 
vented, settled, and forgotten by keeping the boys con- 
tinually playing together. The covenant of the League of 
Nations, however, seems to provide an umpire who prom- 
ises to be much more efficient in fining players and sus- 
pending them from the game than in crying, "Play ball!" 
All of this, of course, is to criticize the League of 
Nations, not because it goes too far, but because it does 
not go far enough. The saddest thing about the present 
situation is that most of the criticisms which are voiced 
are from the opposite point of view. All of us, of course, 
would rather see a game which is presided over by an 
umpire who freely fines and suspends than one which 
tends to degenerate into a free-for-all fight. My whole 
point is that some of us prefer a game which contains 
neither of these characteristics. Perhaps it was impossible 
for the framers of this covenant to go further than they 
did in the way of providing a real substitute for war, 
but, however this may be, it is certainly incumbent upon 
us to recognize clearly the limitations of the present plan 
and not to make the serious mistake of regarding the 
League of Nations in this form as in itself a substitute for 
war. At best, the League will merely make it more 
difficult for the great work of the various international 
agencies — commercial, financial, agricultural, industrial, 
religious, and educational — which operate powerfully 
to develop feelings of solidarity, to be interrupted by war. 
It is these cooperative agencies of a non-governmental 
character which are doing the most to produce unity 



The Need Emphasized 41 

and to make war more and more impossible. The League 
of Nations will merely help them in this work in a more 
or less negative way. We shall probably be required to 
wait a while longer before the governments of the world 
themselves will be willing to join these non-governmental 
agencies in the great work of fostering international 
cooperation and unity — before they will be willing to 
cooperate extensively, not only in creating tools for their 
common use, but in performing definite constructive 
tasks, common cooperative services. 

The War was a war against war, but war can never 
destroy war. The League of Nations is a means to prevent 
war, but the covenant of the League of Nations provides 
no real substitute for war. The only real substitute for 
war is cooperation. Only when it is recognized that 
international contacts are opportunities for cooperation 
as well as causes of conflict, and only as these contacts are 
greatly extended and increased in the interests of coopera- 
tion, will the discord and sorrow and waste of war be 
supplanted by the harmony, the joy, and the productivity 
of cooperative service. 

The War, viewed as a whole, had in it a decided com- 
petitive element which was entirely out of harmony with 
the true cooperative spirit. But here again, side by side 
with this great weakness which needs no emphasis, we 
find a lofty virtue. The War was a great collective 
occupation, which at once satisfied a widespread desire 
for an opportunity to apply the cooperative principle 
and developed in every department of life a more vivid 
sense of unity. 



42 The Christian Task 

5. The War as a Task for the Task's Sake: In- 
volving A Tremendous Risk of Self, a Sacrificial 
Service of Others, and Abundant Joy 

The great experience of the War emphasized the fact 
that the need of a task which can be undertaken for its 
own sake is felt keenly by the present age. The War was a 
task which by its very nature excluded selfishness. There 
was little room in the service for self-seekers. The men 
whose highest thoughts were of their fortunes and their 
hides naturally collected into a class of slackers. So fully 
was this the case, in fact, that suspicion of selfishness fell 
to some extent upon all who were not actively and directly 
engaged in war work. Even the few men who held them- 
selves aloof from the War for the very highest and best 
of reasons were often quite naturally suspected of being 
self-seekers. The War was a task which called for an 
unusually large element of personal risk, and it was this 
characteristic which, as much as any other, appealed to 
this unselfish age. 

Of course, selfishness of some kinds found its way into 
war activities. There was a certain amount of seeking 
after personal glory, fame, and adventure. The principal 
appeal of war work for some men was undoubtedly that 
it provided a better living than they could obtain elsewhere. 
Some really selfish, nevertheless undertook war work 
because of fear of public opinion. Traces of selfishness, of 
seeking after advantages of one kind and another, are no 
doubt to be found in the nations which were engaged in 
the War as well as in the individuals. But it must be 
said that, on the whole, the War appealed to the race as an 



The Need Emphasized 43 

altruistic job. It was a task which made a supreme test of 
man's capacity to forget himself in serving others. Elim- 
inating all gross individualism, it allowed only for that 
higher quality which we have called personalism — that is, 
the consciousness of the tremendous moral effects which 
an individual's work of sacrificial service wrought in 
himself as a member of the race. 

But the War called forth something higher than 
personalism. It required that consciousness dwell not so 
much upon the effects wrought in the individuals who 
served as upon the effects wrought in those who were 
served, and in them not so much as individuals as mem- 
bers of the race. The War provided an opportunity for 
sacrificial service, not only of one's country, not only of 
groups outside of one's own country which were oppressed 
with particular severity, not only of a cause which em- 
braced many nations, but of a cause which bore vitally 
upon humanity as a whole. Thus, to a degree never before 
experienced by the world, the War met an acutely felt 
need for an opportunity to work as never before in the 
interests of the race. 

An incident which is reported to have occurred upon 
the occasion of the arrival at a French port of the first 
transports carrying American troops splendidly illustrates 
this spirit and the consciousness of altruism which the War 
promoted. An observer has described the arrival of these 
ships by saying: 

"One by one they slid up the channel, passing near us 
as they made a turn that brought them close to shore. 
The beach was dotted with delighted French people. On 



44 The Christian Task 

the low wall of a garden that sloped down from the villa 
near which we had stopped, a French girl was standing. 
She was, perhaps, sixteen, and she held an American flag 
that waved over her head and threatened to lift her from 
the wall as the breeze caught its briUiant folds. A ship 
passed close in, and she waved the flag with all her strength. 
On the crowded deck of the transport the troops waved in 
return. Another ship passed, and again she waved the 
flag. Again the crowded decks answered. And then, 
steaming sedately up the channel, came one of the former 
German liners, once named for a member of the royal 
house of HohenzoUern. Its decks were crowded with three 
thousand men. The rigging was filled with them. The 
rails were lined. Every inch of the ship's enormous 
length seemed alive with men in khaki and sailors in blue. 
The girl on the wall seized her flag with renewed vigor, and 
waved it madly. We expected to see the same answer the 
other ships had given, but instead, as I trained my glasses 
on the bridge, I saw an officer seize a megaphone. The 
gold on his sleeve glistened in the sun as he spoke to the 
men below him. The distance was too great for us to hear 
his words, but a moment later the ship seemed swayed by 
a common impulse. Every hat waved in the air for an 
instant, waved again — and again. Then over the 
glistening water came three mighty cheers. 

"The girl stood amazed. For a moment she failed to 
grasp it all, and finally it dawned on her that they had 
returned her greeting — that the spirit of America had 
answered that of France. She seized her flag, and waved it 
until it snapped in the breeze. Then, overcome by her 
emotions, she jumped from the wall, and threw her arms 
about the neck of a little woman in black who was standing 
there. 

^'Chere mere* she cried, His sont venus pour la France.**'^ 

1 Daniel Hawthorne, WorWs Work, Dec, 1917, p. 187. 



The Need Emphasized 45 

Work for work's sake as we have described it, however, 
is something which transcends altruism. It requires that 
supreme emphasis be placed not upon the effects, moral or 
otherwise, which result from work — unless these effects 
are interpreted also to include the great joy which accom- 
panies the performance of highly moral acts — but upon 
the doing of the work itself. The most real effects of work, 
as we have already seen, are the increase of the capacity 
for work and the joy which accompanies the performance 
of the work. The retention of these effects is conditioned 
upon the continuance and increase of moral activity. 
It is activity, therefore, or at most the joy of service and 
the capacity for service which directly accompanies it, 
which is eternal. It is moral activity which is at once the 
means of salvation and salvation itself, existence and the 
supreme end of existence. It is salvation in this sense, which 
results from work for work's sake, that the age demands. 

That the War temporarily met this supreme desire of 
the race is quite evident from the great joy which filled the 
hearts of all who caught and manifested in their service 
the real spirit of the task which the War provided. The 
fact is patent that the activities and sacrifices called for 
by the War filled the world with a depth of religious fervor 
and joy which it had never before experienced. The War, 
indeed, was one of the greatest religious experiences of 
the race. 

In writing, not of the War as a whole, but merely of 
its beginning, Sabatier says: 

"The manner in which the people of France accepted 
her decision on the evening of the 1st of August 1914 and 



46 The Christian Task 

the following night — and when I say the people, that is 
exactly the word I mean to use, and no other: the common 
people, the agricultural population of our country-sides 
and the working population of our towns — amounted 
to the collective accomplishment of a religious act which 
was perhaps the grandest and the most definite of history 
since that tragic night when the Son of Man, beneath 
the olives of Gethsemane, complied with the will of His 
Heavenly Father. And this is what gives our national 
hymns, when they break forth on the battlefield, a beauty 
and a wealth of meaning which we never knew was theirs. 
They express our love of our native soil, but above 
all they sing the ideal truths which we had too long for- 
gotten, the joy of sacrifice for others, the joy of giving 
one's life for the truth, the joy of making death a source 
of Hfe. 

"The war has brought sorrows unspeakable to all our 
homes, but we should be short-sighted indeed did we fail 
to perceive that it also has brought with it an immense 
cause for joy: suddenly, irresistibly, it brought us to a 
standstill, and, wresting us from all our egotistical cares, 
our daily anxieties, our trivial pleasures, our pitiful dis- 
cussions, it set before us duties, responsibilities, and 
sacrifices such as no generation of the past was ever 
confronted with. 

"This terrible summons, addressed to France first of 
all — was it not a supreme honour for the whole nation; 
was it not like a sign of election t France understood its 
meaning, and individual sorrows were swallowed up in the 
joy of the nation, that it was once again in her power to do 
great things, to resume her historic mission, to affirm her 
ideal." 1 

The War, since it so thoroughly satisfied the various 
other requirements of the ideal task for the race, made it 

iPaul Sabatier, "A Frenchman's Thoughts on the War," pp. 98-100. 



The Need Emphasized 47 

possible for men and nations to prosecute it joyfully, as a 
task pursued for its own sake. 

6. The War as a Temporary Task: The Problem 
OF Peace 

It may have been noted that, in speaking above of the 
War's satisfaction of the need of a task which can be under- 
taken for its own sake, I characterized this satisfaction as 
temporary. This serious limitation needs now to be em- 
phasized and to be extended to each of the other require- 
ments which we have been considering. We have pointed 
out, in analyzing the kind of a task that the age needs, 
that the ideal task must of necessity be eternal. If salva- 
tion is moral activity, then, if salvation is to be an abiding 
possession of the individual and the race, the individual 
and the race must be eternally active. If the individual is 
to be assured of eternal salvation, he must be assured 
that the task to which he devotes himself wholeheartedly 
in this life is one to which he will be able to devote himself 
eternally in the life beyond. If the race is to feel assured 
of eternal salvation — and it will not be content with 
less — the task which will challenge its best efforts must, 
in addition to other things, give promise of never play- 
ing out. The final demand of the age is for an eternal 
task. 

This demand for an eternal task the War failed utterly 
to meet. It lasted four short years, and then it ended. It 
not only did end; it had to end, for, despite the fact that 
for the time being it met the needs of the race better than 
any other single and definite task which the race has yet 



48 The Christian Task 

confronted, it embodied destructive and competitive 
elements which rendered it seriously unfit to be the per- 
manent task of humanity. These serious weaknesses were 
pointed out above. They could, but need not, be illus- 
trated and emphasized here, for the fact remains that, 
whatever the causes, the War has come to a close, and the 
salvation which it brought as a task which could be 
pursued for its own sake has been lost. 

I say "has been lost,'' but this is only partly true. It 
is true in the sense that the deep religious joy, which filled 
the hearts of those who found in the War a supreme 
opportunity for unlimited service of the kind which we 
have described, has fled. Who would think, for instance, 
of comparing the spirit which was widely manifested in 
our peace celebrations with the spirit which greeted the 
coming of the War? What a vast difference between 
Sabatier's description of the latter and our newspaper 
accounts of the former! Nor is the fault the reporters*. 
Could even a Sabatier have made the reports of the peace 
celebrations more inspiring and been true to the facts? 
No, a world sobered by war was made drunken by the news 
of peace. 

At any rate, we call this peace, and peace is a thing to 
be desired and admired; but if this is peace — this un- 
happy state of unemployment, this renewed interest in 
trivial pleasures, this dimmed consciousness of capacity 
for service, this loss of true spiritual perspective, this 
diminution of the creative impulse, this slipping back 
into petty rivalries and jealousies, this recalling of for- 
gotten injuries, this resurrection of egotistical cares and 



The Need Emphasized 49 

personal anxieties — if this is peace, say all deeply thought- 
ful and truly religious men, give us war! But better yet, 
give us a task which will measure up more fully than 
the War to the ideal which the race has set for itself. 

If some of us were sober in the midst of the peace 
celebrations, it was not because we were sad that the 
War had come to an end. It was because we were con- 
scious of the fact that the winning of the War was but 
the beginning of a much greater task which had yet to be 
accomplished, and because we felt that the manner of the 
peace celebrations smacked too much, therefore, of the 
boasting of one who puts the armor on rather than off. 
We were sober because we realized that, as compared with 
the War, the age, now more than ever, needs a task more 
vast, more truly practical, more exclusively constructive, 
more thoroughly cooperative, more worthy of being made 
the end of existence, eternal. Give it such a task and you 
will not only restore to it the surpassing joy of work for 
work's sake which has already fled, but will preserve for 
it the tremendous capacity for unselfish moral activity 
which still lingers. If we procrastinate until this capacity 
too has fled, the War will have been fought in vain, and 
salvation in its fullest sense will have to be secured again. 

The supreme need of the age is the need of a task. 
That this need is acutely felt by the age is proved by 
various evidences, but by no more conclusive piece of 
evidence than that furnished by the appeal which the War, 
imperfect as it was as a representation of the ideal task, 
made to the world. It stands to reason that, by meeting 
this need partly but only temporarily, the War merely 



50 The Christian Task 

aggravated the sense of need. The War, in truth, must be 
regarded not as the satlsfier, but as the discoverer, of this 
need. Now, far more than ever before, is the need felt 
acutely. A more perfect satisfaction is eagerly desired. 
Is there any source from which the age may reasonably 
expect this more perfect satisfaction to come? If so, 
where is that source? 



CHAPTER IV 

THE NEED SATISFIED: THE NEED AND THE 

CHRISTIAN TASK OF ESTABLISHING 

THE KINGDOM OF GOD ON EARTH. 

The answer to the question as to where the age must 
look for the satisfaction of its supreme need of a task is 
"Christianity." Nor is this the answer of one individual 
only. It is the answer of every true follower of Christ. 
Neither is this the answer of sincere but possibly over- 
zealous faith. It is an answer which finds its justification 
in a long tradition, in a wide experience, in an unfettered 
reason. It surely is not an answer for which the reader was 
entirely unprepared. He must have repeatedly read it 
between the lines of the preceding discussion. The need, 
it was said, is for activity, and not merely activity, but 
moral activity of the very highest form. This is just what 
religion, in its truest manifestations, is. If life is activity, 
religion is activity at its best and fullest. 

In emphasizing this very point, Sabatier gives us a 
splendid description of religion at its best in stating that 

"religion comprises three series of facts: firstly, 

the intuition of a personal and social ideal above the 
present reality; secondly, a movement of our whole being, 
physical as well as moral, towards that ideal, as well as 
the whole of our efforts to realize it; finally, the act of 
faith by which, when we have affirmed the ideal, when we 
feel that we are made for it, we also feel, despite all ob- 
stacles, that we are capable of attaining it: the act of 
faith which, plainly perceiving the difficulties, leaves to 
reason the task of studying them, and regards itself as 

51 



52 The Christian Task 

certain of victory; if it must be, after many defeats, and 
even through every sacrifice. " ^ 

It is the element of highest moral activity which is most 
prominent in this description of religion at its best. It is 
just this that the age needs most. Consequently, I say 
that it must have been evident to the reader that the only 
answer to the question which we have stated which could 
prove finally satisfactory to the age had to be of necessity 
the answer "religion," and not merely the answer " re- 
ligion,*' but, as the religion which most completely fulfills 
this requirement of the ideal religion, the answer "Chris- 
tianity." It should be noted that Christianity is put 
forward, not as the only, but as the best answer to the 
question. This answer, we say, was implicit in the entire 
preceding discussion. We shall now endeavor to make it 
explicit by showing how Christianity best meets the 
supreme need of the age — the need which, although 
more acutely felt today than ever before, is as old as 
religion itself — the need of a task of the kind which we 
have described. 

Christianity best meets the supreme need of the age by 
inviting the race as a whole to join in the performance of 
the greatest of all tasks, of which it is customary to speak 
in traditional and theological language as "the establish- 
ment of the kingdom of God on earth." This was the 
task which challenged the unlimited enthusiasm and 
unswerving allegiance, which commanded the superior 
and unstinted services, of the founder of Christianity. 
This was the task toward which he was yearning even 

iPaul Sabatier, "A Frenchman's Thoughts on the War," p. 96. 



The Need Satisfied 53 

as a lad, when he announced to his wondering parents 
that he must be about his Father's business. This was the 
great social ideal in the interests of which Jesus lived, 
worked, and died. It was by no means an ideal which was 
original with Jesus, but it was an ideal which he saw most 
clearly and represented a task the need of which he felt 
most acutely. He handed down his superior conception 
of the ideal task to his followers. Just to the extent to 
which they have been true Christians, Jesus' ideal of the 
kingdom has been central in their lives. Its appeal to men 
of the present age is especially strong. 

The ideal of the kingdom has been described correctly 
and beautifully as follows: 

"The Gospel of Christianity is that of the kingdom of 
God. It takes for granted the fatherhood of God, the 
brotherhood of man, and the infinite worth of the in- 
dividual human soul. To the sinful it offers forgiveness; 
to the weak, strength; to the sorrowing, comfort; and to 
all, the opportunity of brotherly service and sacrifice. It 
seeks to organize mankind into a spiritual society, in- 
dependent of race, nationality, education, or class; in 
which love shall be the bond of union, and humility the 
test of greatness. But, unlike purely ethical systems, it 
finds its motive power in the redemptive love of the good 
God, who has given his Son to be the Saviour of the world, 
and whose fatherly purpose and character Jesus reveals. 
While it postpones the complete realization of the kingdom 
to the future, it affirms that it is present here and now; 
and that entrance to it is possible to all who through 
penitence and faith accept the gracious invitation of the 
Master, and, denying themselves, take up their cross and 
follow him. "1 

1 William Adams Brown "Christian Theology in Outline," pp. 37,38. 



54 The Christian Task 

The task of organizing mankind into the society- 
described above is what Christianity offers the race. That 
the race can do no better than to accept this task will be 
seen more clearly as we proceed to point out the superior 
way in which this task meets the several requirements 
of the ideal task which we have already discussed in the 
two preceding chapters. 

1. The Establishment of the Kingdom as a Big 
Task: A Call to Messiahship 

There is no need of emphasizing the fact that the work 
of establishing the kingdom of God on earth meets the 
first requirement of the ideal task. It is a big and a 
difficult task that Christianity offers. So big and difficult 
is it, in fact, that one of the principal grounds of antagon- 
ism to Christianity has always been its large element of 
ambition and presumption. 

Concerning the place of this element of presumption in 
Christianity, Professor William Ernest Hocking has 
written : 

" In truth, ambition is the essence of religion , . .If 
religion destroys ambition, it destroys itself. The solution 
of Christianity perceives this principle .... Ambi- 
tion ... is the most characteristic product of 
Christianity in the field of behavior. It is the passion for 
the historic spread of the new community, or in more 
personal form, the 'passion for souls.' Nothing is more 
dominant in the early history of this cult than the willing- 
ness to suffer, to be despised, to endure all things, if by any 
means some could be persuaded to become members of the 
community, the kingdom of heaven in the guise of a 
mihtant church on earth. 



The Need Satisfied 55 

"The community with which it (the passion for souls) 
concerns itself is never merely an invisible church of all 
the loyal, such as Professor Royce had in mind as the 
'beloved community/ It is this; but it is also an institution 
among institutions, having its own work in the world and 
its own aims. It is among other institutions somewhat as 
the State is among them, while in its purposes it includes 
them and reflects upon all of them. Its purpose is to hold 
out precisely this interpretation of their wills to all men as 
being the adequate interpretation; to bring all plans and 
goods into subordination to this; and thus, while nominally 
undermining all other institutions, to pave the way for the 
most subtle of common understandings, the interracial and 
international understandings which are crystallizing in 
the shape of a world culture and an international law. 
Thus Christianity becomes a corporate body having an 
ambition of its own: it becomes a propaganda, breaks 
across the provincial boundaries of its origin, and aspires 
to universality. Like Buddhism, it is by its own principle 
a missionary religion. And if by being *true' we mean 
among other things being awake to the nature of one's 
business in this world, we may say that no religion is a 
true religion which does not in this way aspire to be 
corporate and universal." 

"Original Christianity," writes Prof. Hocking in 
another connection, "encountered precisely the same 
criticism of its aims, namely, that they are presumptuous. 
Was it not this very charge that led to the crucifixion, 
and from the point of view of the judges perhaps justly 
so.f* For did not this man profess to forgive sins, and in 
other ways make himself equal with God? And did he 
not hand over the keys of heaven and hell to his followers.? 
He professed to save others, and it was a pointed gibe, 
regarded as equivalent to a refutation, that he could not 
save himself. In political translation, the offense of the 
man was in his pretended kingship, the true substance of 



55 The Christian Task 

which was his self-asserted mastery over the souls of men. 
Historically speaking, the crux of Christianity is its 
element of presumption." ^ 

The Christian task of establishing the kingdom of God 
on earth is indeed ambitious. Many faint hearts, in 
merely contemplating the task, have been filled with 
despair. Strong hearts, however, have been made to 
exult. The best men of the race have deemed the task 
worthy of their best thought, their most earnest prayers, 
their most efficient services. The task is so big that, in 
spite of two millenniums of aspiration and work, the 
kingdom of God is still far more future than present. It is 
a mustard seed which has barely begun to germinate, and 
which has yet to grow into a great plant. 

When we once conceive of the bigness of the task of 
establishing God's rule over the world, we can no longer 
be surprised that some men have felt themselves forced to 
regard the task as one which God alone can accomplish — 
as one in the accomplishment of which the efforts of man 
are of no avail. This is especially true of our attitude 
toward those, such as the apocalyptists, who regarded the 
kingdom as entirely future but nevertheless at hand. 
If we believed either that the present state of affairs 
is all wrong or that the ideal state of affairs will be 
established in entirety in a short time, we should be 
forced to recognize that the task is suitable for God alone. 
Most of the men who have held the latter view have 
held both of the former beliefs. Holding these two beliefs, 

1 William Ernest Hocking, "Human Nature and Its Remaking/* 

pp. 377-381. 



The Need Satisfied 57 

and being conscious of the bigness of the task, they could 
scarcely miss drawing the conclusion they drew. 

Even without the burden of either of these two beliefs, 
the bigness of the task is for us a real difficulty, which we 
cannot entirely overcome by resolving the process by 
which it is to be accomplished into a gradual, endless 
evolution. We find it necessary to assign to God a large 
share of the work. We take to ourselves only what we 
can handle. Both God and man are essential to the 
accomplishment of the task. 

The truly remarkable thing about Jesus' view of the 
task is that, having cast aside the pessimistic view of the 
present, but still holding to the view that the ideal state 
of affairs was to be ushered in in its entirety in the very 
near future, he nevertheless found it possible to assign to 
man an essential part of the work of bringing in the king- 
dom. The idea of men's helping to bring in the kingdom 
was entirely foreign to the thought of Jesus' time. God's 
special representative, the Messiah, alone could perform 
this gigantic task. All that ordinary men could do was 
to prepare themselves for the coming of the kingdom, 
and this preparation involved matters altogether foreign 
to the work of establishing the kingdom. Our idea that 
men can prepare themselves for the kingdom only by 
working to establish it in the world was not present in 
the thought of Jesus' time; but it was present in Jesus' 
thought. 

In the light of this fact, may it not have been Jesus' 
acute consciousness of the need of engaging himself in the 
really big task of bringing in the kingdom and of thus 



58 The Christian Task 

preparing himself for its coming that finally led him to lay- 
claim to be the Messiah, or at least led his followers to 
make this claim concerning him? However, no matter 
what the nature and source of the claim, it is a fact that 
cannot be denied that Jesus actually did take a large part 
of the Messiah's work upon himself, and that he actually 
did make lesser messiahs out of every man whom he called 
to be his follower. Jesus called men from the little tasks 
of catching fish and of collecting taxes for the great Roman 
Empire to the big tasks of catching men and of working 
for the establishment of God's kingdom. Jesus called 
men not only to repentance, but to the big task of estab- 
lishing God's rule over all men, to the practical task of 
doing God's will, of going about doing good. It was a 
task worthy of man's sense of infinite capability. It is a 
task than which no other yet conceived by man can better 
meet the supreme need of the age. 

2. The Establishment of the Kingdom as a Practical 
Task: Jesus the Servant of Every Need, a 
Neglected Ideal 

We have already indicated that the work of establishing 
the kingdom of God on earth satisfies the added require- 
ment of a practical task. The practical element has been 
prominent in all ideas of the kingdom itself. The kingdom 
has always been thought of as the ideal state in which 
every need of man, physical, mental, moral, and industrial 
but, in a special sense, every spiritual need of man — has 
been met. The general tendency of thought a,bout the 
kingdom has been to recognize both the necessarily close 



The Need Satisfied 59 

connection between all of man*s needs and the special 
importance of his spiritual needs — a dual recognition 
which we have previously characterized as being of the 
essence of the truly practical attitude. If at times thought 
about the kingdom has tended to emphasize spiritual 
needs, not merely to the subordination but to the ex- 
clusion of other needs, the fault has been due to the 
practical interest in overcoming the persistent refusal of 
man to rise above the consciousness of his primary needs 
to a keen sense of his ultimate spiritual needs. 

This fault, however, has displayed itself not so much in 
thought concerning the kingdom itself as in thought con- 
cerning the work of establishing the kingdom. In thought 
about the kingdom itself the practical element has been 
very prominent, but in thought about the work of estab- 
lishing the kingdom the practical element has often been 
lacking. When this work has been assigned entirely to 
God or to his special representative, the Messiah, the 
work has assumed a supernatural rather than a practical 
character. Even when man has been given a share in this 
work, his activity has often been interpreted as too 
exclusively spiritual rather than practical. 

This over-emphasis of the exclusively spiritual element, 
however, has not been true of the best thought concerning 
the work of establishing the kingdom. Jesus, for instance, 
at a time when to do so was to risk his life, not only gave 
men a share in the work of bringing in the kingdom but 
interpreted this work as being very practical. He 
called men to a repentance which involved a change of 
attitude not only toward God, but toward their neighbors 



60 The Christian Task 

who were to work with them in the fuller establishment of 
the kingdom which, in part, was already present. 

Jesus was most considerate of man's primary needs. 
He fed men. He healed men. He taught men. He gave 
men work. He, like the present age, preferred saying, 
"Arise, take up thy bed, and walk" to saying, "Thy sins be 
forgiven thee." And yet he clearly recognized that this 
service of the primary needs was merely preliminary — 
that behind these primary needs there lay deeper and 
more important spiritual needs, which men must satisfy 
for themselves by undertaking to serve others. Jesus 
conditioned entrance into the kingdom of heaven upon 
the efficient and sacrificial service of all of the needs of 
men. He recognized that the joy of the kingdom, which 
accompanies the fullest satisfaction of spiritual needs, 
comes only to those who take up their crosses and follow 
him — to those, in other words, who join wholeheartedly 
in the very practical work of establishing God's kingdom 
on earth. 

Jesus' emphasis upon the practical nature of the work 
of establishing the kingdom of God on earth has always 
been true of Christianity at its best; but it is here that 
Christianity has failed seriously to measure up to its 
ideal. In the course of a severe but fair arraignment of the 
Church because of her lack of interest in matters of 
practical social reform, a recent writer remarks: 

"Up till now . . the very reformers who arose 
within the Church have worked all through their lives with 
a sad sense upon them that the Church as a whole was not 
with them, and that if only the Church were fully awakened 



The Need Satisfied 61 

victory complete and full would be an easy thing. The 
Church has been very busy indeed at times, making sure 
that her own rights were respected. She has been also 
very busy in controversy, and in the conflicts which 
arise from ecclesiastical differences. She has cared a 
great deal about her buildings, and her ritual, and her 
internal organization. She has even done great things in 
the realm of scholarship. But to the average man it seems 
as if the great practical tasks that confront her at her very 
doors have on the whole been neglected. And the result is 
that the average man feels that the Church cares very 
much about things which do not interest him, and very 
little about the wrongs and injustices under which he 
labors year after year. 

"The Church has often made things very much 
worse in this connection, by asserting that these practical 
questions which engross our poorer brethren are after all 
materialistic. She has thus often implied that it is no part 
of her business to be concerned about them. Sentiments 
of that kind are very popular among certain well-nourished 
gentlemen who wear expensive clothes, and they are not 
altogether in disrepute among ministers with large 
stipends. The ones with small stipends know only too well 
that it is quite impossible to separate the question of a 
man's material condition from the question of his spiritual 
health. And the poor men of the country know that with 
bitter certainty. They rebel against their lot just because 
the spirit that is within them is hungry for a larger life — 
because they want, to begin with, to be able to have 
healthy bodies — because they want to be able to express 
their parental love by giving their children a healthy up- 
bringing and the good start in life which comes from good 
nourishment and a sound education — because they want 
to get out from under the burden of anxiety that weighs 
them down, and to have free minds for truth, beauty, and 
worship, and free hearts for love and friendship. The poor 



62 Thg Christian Task 

man in a modern city is a man always fighting forces that 
threaten his life: he lives a narrow life amidst uncertainties 
which rob him of rest: he has to be constantly thinking 
about money. In such circumstances the mind does not 
have a chance to exert its full power and the soul is em- 
barrassed. The discipline of a fight with poverty has 
proved a splendid thing for many a man in his youth. But 
nobody who has had to live through life in constant 
anxiety about the necessary means of life has any doubt 
about it that poverty of that type and degree is essentially 
depressing. 

"Our depressed poor are tragically clear about it, and 
any institution that seems to them to deny it necessarily 
arouses their hostility. A church that would claim to care 
about their souls while utterly indifferent to the state of 
their bodies would seem to them simply a silly church, that 
was not taking account of the plain truth about this 
incarnate life of ours. 

"And thus it has come to pass that the mass of the 
people in our country really do remain in doubt as to 
whether the Church really cares about them. A few 
roundly assert that she does not. The majority think it an 
open question. At the best, the Church is under suspicion. *'^ 

Of course, other religions than Christianity and other 
institutions besides the Christian Church have failed even 
more seriously to be truly practical. It is scarcely to be 
doubted that not only the ideal but the actual practice of 
Christianity in this regard has far transcended anything 
which we find to exist, either potentially or actually, in 
other religions. But a clear recognition of this fact ought 
not to hinder Christians from resolving that hereafter 
their practice shall better represent the Christian ideal. 

lA. Herbert Gray, "As Tommy Sees Us," pp. 106-8. 



The Need Satisfied 63 

Unless this serious discrepancy between the ideal and 
the practice of Christianity is overcome, the Christian 
task of establishing God's dominion over men will not 
appeal to the age with its full force. Christianity, organ- 
ized and unorganized, must not only associate itself with, 
but assume the leadership in, every movement for econ- 
omic, educational, political, industrial, and spiritual reform" 
which seeks to satisfy better all of the needs of man. 
Conceived in its truest manifestations, the task to which 
Christianity calls the race satisfies the need of the age 
for a practical task supremely well. 

3. The Establishment of the Kingdom as a Con- 
structive Task: Catastrophe, a Dangerous 
Survival: The Problem of Evil 

What we have said about the manner in which Chris- 
tianity, in offering to the race the work of establishing the 
kingdom of God on earth, satisfies the need of the age for 
a practical task applies also to the manner in which 
Christianity satisfies the need of the age for a constructive 
task. A discrepancy between the ideal state which is 
desired and the work of establishing it, similar to that 
which was discovered in the preceding connection, is pres- 
ent here as well. There we discovered that thought about 
the kingdom itself was always consistent in regarding it as 
a place where the practical attitude controlled, but that 
thought about the work of establishing the kingdom often 
tended to become impractical. In the present connection 
we find that the kingdom has always been regarded as a 
place where there shall be no more catastrophe — as a 



64 The Christian Task 

place from which murders and earthquakes and fire and 
floods and famines and droughts and wars shall be entirely- 
eliminated. But, on the other hand, the work of estabHsh- 
ing the kingdom has often been closely associated with 
these very things which we have mentioned. Especially 
when this work has been assigned entirely to God, when 
the view of the present has been entirely pessimistic and 
the view of the immediate future has been extremely 
optimistic, has this catastrophic and destructive emphasis 
been present. The present state of affairs is altogether bad. 
The ideal state of affairs is about to be established. The 
emphasis was naturally and, although not necessarily so, 
almost exclusively upon God's destructive wrath, which 
was to be given vent to in an abundance and variety of 
destructive acts. 

But Jesus found the materials of the future in the 
present. And, although he seems to have thought that 
the kingdom was to be established in its fulness in the near 
future, he does not seem to have employed the idea of 
God's condemning and destroying activity. As we have 
seen, he made the work of bringing in the kingdom a work 
v/ for both God and man, but it was in the nature of man's 
work that he was most interested. We are left to surmise 
what may have been his conception of the nature of 
God's work. The task which Jesus himself undertook and 
to which he called others was clearly a constructive task. 
Jesus compared the kingdom not to a gigantic mine, but 
to a mustard seed planted in the earth; not to a bomb, but 
to a piece of leaven. He told Peter to put up his sword. 
His summons was to a work of constructive service. 



The Need Satisfied 65 

In every sense, he came not to destroy but to trans- 
form. 

Perhaps it was not so much Jesus' assumption of the 
work of the Messiah, as it wa? his refusal to perform this 
work in the manner in which it was generally thought that 
the Messiah would perform it, that proved obnoxious 
to the men of his time. Some of Jesus' contemporaries 
looked for an earthly Son of David, who would establish 
his rule over the earth by physical force. Others looked 
for a supernatural Son of Man, who would establish God's 
rule throughout the world by a miraculous display of 
destructive power. Jesus, however, conscientiously ob- 
jected to playing either of these roles. He chose rather 
to be the Suffering Servant of the race. Jesus won the 
disfavor of the men of his time by refusing to apply the 
destructive principle in his work of bringing in the king- 
dom. Is it not a sad commentary on the present state 
of affairs that organized Christianity so often tends 
to win the disfavor of the present age because of its too 
great sympathy with the destructive principle — because 
of its failure to emphasize and to require the thorough 
application of the constructive principle ? 

The present age, especially since the experience of the 
Great War, demands a task which will require the ex- 
clusive application of the constructive principle. We have 
seen that war embodies a decidedly constructive element, 
but that this exists by the side of a decidedly destructive 
element which renders war entirely unsatisfactory as the 
permanent task for the race. War is an evil from which, 
as we have already had occasion to point out, much good 



66 The Christian Task 

comes, but It is by no means a necessary evil. It is an 
evil which, like every other evil, must be entirely elimi- 
nated. 

The experience of the race proves, moreover, that even 
evil cannot be eliminated by the process of destruction. 
It is not to be fought either by the sword of steel or the 
sword of truth. It can be successfully overcome only by 
rescuing the forces which have begun to run in the chan- 
nels of evil and by directing them into the channels of 
good. Life is the necessity of activity. As long as man is 
alive he must do something. If we do not supply the active 
child with something good to do, he will soon be in mis- 
chief. And once he has fallen into mischief, the only 
proper and constructive way to rescue him from it is not 
to deny him the pleasure and good which he is actually 
getting out of his mischief, but to promise him a greater 
pleasure and good to be derived from some other definite 
task which you actually offer to him. 

If Adam was placed in the garden of Eden without any 
definite, constructive task. It is no wonder that he fell, for 
evil lurks in every garden of leisure. But It was a fall from 
a state of passionless inactivity into a state where It was 
possible for him to be either temporarily and partly happy 
in his works of evil or permanently and wholly happy in 
his works of good. This choice became his, and whichever 
he chose, he must have been conscious of the fact that he 
had passed from hell into heaven, for the difference 
between the state of leisure, which is as near the boundary 
of inactivity and passionlessness as man can get and still 
live, and the state of active evil — like the difference 



The Need Satisfied 61 

between this state of active evil and the state of active 
good — is the difference between hell and heaven. 

It might have been some such distinction as this 
that Jesus had in mind when he said, "I came not to 
bring peace, but a sword." At least, we have already 
agreed that between peace of a certain type and war 
of a certain type the vote must be cast unanimously 
for war. 

But this choice between the idle and the active life is 
not the only choice that man has. It has been God's 
eternal purpose to make it more and more necessary for 
man to choose rightly between the life of active evil and 
the life of active good, and he has sought to do this, not 
by the negative and destructive method of denying man 
the freedom of doing evil, but by the positive and con- 
structive method of offering man a part in the great task 
of establishing the kingdom of God on earth. Just to the 
extent that men catch the force and understand the full 
significance of this appeal, will they find it necessary to 
abandon their evil actions and to choose the constructive 
work of righteousness. Not until we recognize the necessity 
of taking this exclusively positive and constructive 
attitude, not only toward our special task of eliminating 
evil from the world but toward our general task of estab- 
lishing God's kingdom on earth, can we hope to be entirely 
successful. 

We often hear it said nowadays that thought about the 
work of establishing the kingdom of God on earth must 
allow for an element of catastrophe. If it is meant that 
catastrophe is necessary to the successful carrying on of 



68 The Christian Task 

this work, we must disagree, for a method which involves 
destructive as well as constructive elements cannot for a 
moment be regarded as necessary to the establishment of 
a society in which the constructive principle is to rule 
supreme. However, if it is meant that catastrophe has 
contributed and can yet contribute to the promotion 
of the kingdom; we agree. But we find it necessary to go 
beyond this agreement and to assert that, since catastrophe 
subtracts from as well as contributes to the establishment 
of the kingdom, it must, as far as is possible, be eliminated 
as a factor in that work. War and evil of all kinds must 
be eliminated, and eliminated by a positive and con- 
structive method. The method of destruction is an im- 
perfect method which must be avoided as far as possible. 
The constructive principle alone must be consciously and 
deliberately applied in the work of establishing the king- 
dom of God on earth. Only as it is so applied will the 
offer of Christianity appeal to an age which throbs with 
the creative impulse. 

4. The Establishment of the Kingdom as a Co- 
operative Task: The Church a Fellowship of 
Workers, an Unrealized Ideal 

The Christian task of establishing the kingdom of God 
on earth meets the need of a cooperative task also. In a 
surpassingly complete way this work satisfies the in- 
stinctive longing of the age for a task in the performance of 
which men can work side by side. It not only makes 
cooperation possible; it requires it, and thus it not only 
satisfies the need for companionship where this need is 



The Need Satisfied 69 

already felt, but both creates and satisfies the need where 
the consciousness of it was not previously acute. 

The work of bringing in the kingdom of God requires 
cooperation by the very fact of its bigness. No man could 
ever think of himself as able to accomplish the task alone. 
In the light of the difficulty of the task, the tendency has 
been rather to despair of ability even to assist in its per- 
formance and to believe that God must do it all. Jesus, 
however, as we have seen, did not despair. He did not, 
on the other hand, feel himself competent to perform the 
task alone. He made God absolutely necessary by affirm- 
ing that he of himself could do nothing. Nor was it with 
him a case of "me and God" alone. In Jesus' opinion, the 
cooperation of each and every man was absolutely neces- 
sary. The task could be entirely accomplished only as all 
did their duty. 

The consequence of this belief was that Jesus set out, at 
the very beginning of his ministry, to gather together 
helpers who would cooperate with him in the work of 
bringing in the kingdom. The little group of twelve was 
the early result. It was not a big group, but it was a 
cooperative group, so the results of its labors were tre- 
mendous. This little original group of followers soon was 
succeeded by a larger and still larger group, and finally 
gave birth to the institution of the Church which has 
come down to us through the ages. It can seriously be 
questioned whether this great cooperative society of those 
who are working for the establishment of the kingdom 
of God on earth would ever have sprung up, had it not 
been for the fact that Jesus had defined and instituted a 



70 The Christian Task 

great task for his followers to perform. The task of 
bringing in the kingdom is the chief cause and the chief 
excuse for the Church. The task, because of its very 
bigness and difficulty, required cooperation. The Church 
is the result. 

The work of establishing the kingdom on earth requires 
cooperation on the part of all, not only because of the 
bigness of the task, but also because the ideal community 
for the establishment of which we work is by definition a 
cooperative community. We could never hope to build up 
a cooperative community through the use of methods 
which allowed for competition. It is only through co- 
operating that we can produce the cooperative state of 
affairs which we call the kingdom. The result is that 
we get together to work for the establishment of the 
kingdom of God on earth, and lo! we discover that just 
to the extent that we succeed in doing this the kingdom 
is here already. The voluntary association of those who 
cooperate for the bringing in of the kingdom is not merely 
the means of which the work is to be accomplished; it is 
part of the end which is sought. The Church is in some 
measure the kingdom of God on earth. 

It may to some seem very strange that I should 
speak of the Church and cooperation in the same breath. 
It is undoubtedly true that displays of the competitive 
spirit have been and still are altogether too frequent 
within the body of those who ought to be working to- 
gether for the establishment of a cooperative community. 
This is true not only of the attitude between individuals, 
societies, sects, and denominations within the Church, but 



The Need Satisfied 71 

also of the general attitude of the Christian Church as a 
whole toward other non-Christian institutions. This 
charge constitutes another serious defect in Christianity's 
ability to meet the supreme need of the age. 

One might rejoin, of course, by asking where else it would 
be possible to find a finer example of cooperation than the 
Church; but the fact that the Church is perhaps the least 
competitive of any of the organizations which could 
otherwise prove satisfactory to the age ought not to be 
allowed to hinder the members of the Church from working 
strenuously for a more positive and fuller manifestation 
of the active cooperative principle. The Christian Church 
cannot make a strong appeal to the age until it begins to 
overcome this serious weakness. There must be a tend- 
ency toward greater unity within the Church and a less 
antagonistic attitude toward those outside the Church. 
The members of the Church must cooperate more fully in 
serving, not themselves, but those outside, whether they 
be the entirely unchurched or the adherents of non- 
Christian religions. If the Church will interest itself more 
in the varied and great practical, constructive tasks of 
service for which it exists, it will have less time and excuse 
for internal dissensions and more need for reliance upon 
its central cooperative principle. This it must do. But 
even as it exists, it is the best example of what the age 
needs. 

Thus we see that Christianity meets the need of the 
age for a cooperative task, not only by furnishing it with a 
task of such a nature that cooperation is absolutely 
necessary for its performance, but also by offering it the 



72 The Christian Task 

services of a large, trained, and experienced body of 
workers who are already organized into a definite co- 
operative society. Christianity offers a task and one of the 
essential instruments for performing it. It offers a task at 
the performance of which a start has already been made. 
Can the age do better than to avail itself of what has 
already been done, the results of which are to be found in 
the Church? It is in the Church, or in some similar 
institution, that men must find that contact with each 
other and with God which will insure the successful 
performance of the task which it needs. Jesus said: "The 
Father worketh hitherto, and I work," and we, too, must 
cooperate if God's kingdom is to come on earth even as it is 
in heaven. We must be laborers together with God. 

5. The Establishment of the Kingdom as a Task 
FOR THE Task's Sake: God the Personal Ideal: 
The Kingdom of God the Social Ideal: Christ 
AND His Church the Supreme Realizations .of 
These Ideals: The Cross of Service and True 
Happiness or Salvation 

It is easier to see how Christianity satisfies the need 
of the age for a task which can be pursued for its own sake. 
The work of bringing in the kingdom is a work which must 
be undertaken in this spirit. It is a work which requires 
the elimination of every particle of selfishness. It provides 
an exceptional opportunity for great personal risk. It is 
true that there was a decided element of self-seeking in those 
who felt that their sole duty with reference to the kingdom 
was to prepare themselves for its coming, and who inter- 



The Need Satisfied 73 

preted this preparation merely as the adjustment of their 
relationship to God. It is true that rank individualism of 
various types has cropped out in Christian circles at 
different times. But, on the whole, Christianity has been 
true to the supreme altruism of its founder and has re- 
joiced to share the risks which he braved. On the whole, 
it has kept faith with the principle of self-sacrifice which 
Jesus laid down and practiced. On the whole, it has 
recognized that it is only through working to bring in the 
kingdom that men can prepare themselves for its coming, 
that it is only by entirely forgetting themselves in the 
service of others that men find joy and happiness, that 
it is only through losing our lives that we find them. The 
kingdom of God has always been regarded as an organiza- 
tion of self-givers, not self-seekers. In it the test of great- 
ness is the ability to serve. 

While excluding every element of selfishness, the work 
of establishing the kingdom of God on earth allows for 
that high form of personalism which we have defined as 
the individual consciousness of the effect of one's acts 
of service in one's own life in the form both of increased 
capacity for service and of personal joy. The history of 
the idea of the kingdom shows that those who have 
worked for its establishment in the world, who have 
forgotten themselves in the active and sacrificial service of 
others, have been the most joyful people in the world. 
Christians have always shown a high regard for Jesus' 
capacity for service. His was a real capacity, developed 
through his work of service. It was a capacity which he 
himself said others might transcend. The work of bringing 



74 The Christian Task 

in the kingdom to which he summoned men was a work 
which set no limits to either the opportunity or the 
capacity for service. In connection with it man's need for 
moral activity and for the development of moral character 
can be most satisfactorily met. The only requirement is 
that this service of others be not undertaken for its eiFect 
upon the individual who serves, and that these effects be 
regarded as social rather than individual effects. It is the 
person in his social capacity only that is worthy of con- 
sideration. The ideal for him is God. The person is to go 
on with his work of service until he is perfect even as God 
is perfect. Jesus never set himself up as the ideal for us. 
While we regard him as the truest manifestation in the 
flesh of what God is, yet we must look through him to the 
Father for our personal ideal. Christianity offers the age 
a task which involves personal progress toward an ideal, 
and the ideal toward which it is necessary for the person 
to progress. 

The work of bringing In the kingdom, however, is 
a social as well as a personal task, and requires prog- 
ress toward a social as well as a personal ideal. Work 
for work's sake allows for the consciousness of this social 
as well as personal progress. It allows, in other words, 
for the consciousness of the effects of one's acts of service 
upon others. An individual's service must always consist 
in the meeting of the needs of others. In meeting these 
needs, he satisfies his own, including his highest spiritual 
needs. But the needs of others that he can satisfy directly 
are only those needs which are not spiritual. One can 
satisfy another's physical, mental, and economic needs to 



The Need Satisfied 75 

a greater or less extent, but one could never satisfy 
another's spiritual needs. The most one can do with 
respect to these spiritual needs is to lead the other into the 
life of sacrificial service from which alone spiritual satis- 
faction comes. It is thought of the race which must al- 
ways be uppermost in one's service of others. 

The social ideal which Christianity offers the age is 
what we call the kingdom of God. Whether or not this 
ideal requires a new name is open to dispute. It is the 
meaning of the ideal not the name, however, which is 
important, and this we have already defined above. It is 
this social ideal of the kingdom which — more even than 
the personal ideal of God and more than either the Church 
or Jesus, the two highest attainments of these ideals — is 
central in Christianity. Jesus made this social ideal 
central in his own life and teaching and we can do no less. 
His command was to "seek first the kingdom of God and 
his righteousness. " The claim of the finality of Christiani- 
ty, however, rests not only upon the superiority of its 
social and personal ideals over those of every other 
religion, but especially upon the superiority of its actual 
realization of these ideals as found in the Church and in 
Jesus. The finality of Christianity rests upon a superiority 
of accomplishment, not merely upon a superiority of ideal. 
It is, of course, to the teaching and the work of Jesus that 
this superiority is due principally, in the final analysis. 
Jesus is Christianity's unique possession. 

The work of realizing Christianity's social ideal, while 
allowing for personalism and altruism, transcends the 
highest altruism and fulfills the supreme requirement of 



76 The Christian Task 

work for work's sake. How it does this we have already 
seen. It does it by recognizing that the most real effects of 
this work of service are dependent upon tjie continuation 
and increase of the work, that it is the service itself and 
the joy which comes directly from it that alone are per- 
manent and constitute salvation. Salvation is not only 
through service; it is service. The kingdom of God is the 
work of establishing the kingdom of God. 

In discussing the subject of salvation, Professor 
Rauschenbusch writes: 

"Sanctification is through increased fellowship with 
God and man. But fellowship is impossible without an 
exchange of service. Here we come back to our previous 
proposition that the Kingdom of God is the common- 
wealth of cooperative service and that the most common 
form of sinful selfishness is the effort to escape from labor. 
Sanctification, therefore, can not be attained in an un- 
productive life, unless it is unproductive through necessity. 
In the long run the only true way to gain moral insight, 
self-discipline, humility, love, and a consciousness of 
coherence and dependence, is to take our place among 
those who serve one another by useful labor. Parasitism 
blinds; work reveals." ^ 

Through offering the age a task which is big enough, 
practical enough, constructive enough, and cooperative 
enough to justify its being undertaken for its own sake, 
Christianity offers to meet the ultimate need of the age — 
the need of happiness or salvation. The symbol of this 
salvation is a cross — not a specific cross which stands for 

1 Walter Rauschenbusch, "A Theology for the Social Gospel," pp. 
102, 103. 



The Need Satisfied 11 

a work of salvation accomplished once for all, but a cross 
which each must bear or help to bear. The age envies the 
man who had the opportunity of relieving Jesus of the 
burden of his cross as he journeyed to his death on Gol- 
gotha. It rejoices in the still greater opportunity of 
helping him bear the heavier burden of that great task of 
bringing in the kingdom in the interests of which he lived, 
worked, and died. In this service it finds the happiness 
and the salvation which it so greatly desires. 

6. The Establishment or the Kingdom as an Eternal 
Task: Social and Personal Immortality; Security 
Assured 

Finally, Christianity meets the need of an eternal task. 
We saw that neither the individual nor the race would 
be satisfied with less than eternal salvation. They will be 
satisfied, in other words, with no less than the possibility 
of eternal work. This is what Christianity offers the race 
in offering it the work of establishing the kingdom of God 
on earth. This task must last forever. The kingdom is 
always coming. As Professor Rauschenbusch has well 
said: 

"An eschatology which is expressed in terms of historic 
development has no final consummation. Its consumma- 
tions are always the basis for further development. The 
Kingdom of God is always coming, but we can never say, 
*Lo, here.' Theologians often assert that this would be 
unsatisfactory. *A kingdom of social righteousness can 
never be perfect; man remains flesh; new generations 
would have to be trained anew; only by a world-catastrophe 
can the kingdom of glory be realized.' Apparently we 



78 The Christian Task 

have to postulate a static condition in order to give our 
minds a rest; an endless perspective of development is too 
taxing. Fortunately God is not tired as easily as we. If he 
called humanity to a halt in a 'kingdom of glory/ he would 
have on his hands some millions of eager spirits whom he 
has himself trained to ceaseless aspiration and achieve- 
ment, and they would be dying of ennui. Besides, what is 
the use of a perfect ideal which never happens? A pro- 
gressive kingdom of righteousness happens all the time 
in instalments, like our own sanctification. Our race will 
come to an end in due time; the astronomical clock is 
already ticking which will ring in the end. Meanwhile 
we are on the march toward the Kingdom of God, and 
getting our reward by every fractional realization of it 
which makes us hungry for more. A stationary humanity 
would be a dead humanity. The life of the race is in its 
growth."^ 

In this paragraph from Professor Rauschenbusch, 
which so forcibly states this Idea of the eternality of the 
task of establishing the kingdom of God on earth, there Is 
a sentence which I would fain have elided. I refer to the 
rather pessimistic statement concerning the ultimate 
destiny of the race. If the race Is to come to an end in due 
time, as Professor Rauschenbusch seems so confident that 
it v/ill, hope of eternal social salvation cannot be enter- 
tained, for this hope requires, as we have already seen, 
that there be an eternal element in the race as well as In 
the task to which the race devotes Itself. But I must 
confess that I experience not the slightest sympathy with 
such gloomy views of the future of the race — and this not 
because to hold such views seems to me to forbid the hope 

1 Rauschenbusch, op. cit., p. 227. 



The Need Satisfied 79 

referred to, but because I fail to see that such views are 
supported by the facts of the case. 

It can, of course, be scientifically demonstrated that 
the earth in due time will reach a stage in its evolution 
which will not be hospitable to life in the form in which it 
is at present found manifested in the race. In this sense it 
is true that the race must sometime come to an end; but 
this is really no sense at all, for in this sense the race has 
already come to an end thousands of times. It has under- 
gone repeated changes of form. But there is little to 
forbid and much to support a belief that the race 
will always continue to exist in some form which will 
permit of its being eternally active in the task of establish- 
ing God's kingdom in the world. As compared with the 
narrow and shortsighted view that life is possible only in 
the forms in which we find it manifested on this planet, I 
feel convinced that Bergson's ambitious and interesting 
theory that life is possible wherever energy descends the 
incline indicated by Carnot's law and where a cause of 
inverse direction can retard the descent — that is to say, 
probably "in all the worlds suspended from all the 
stars" — is far more in keeping with the spirit of true 
religion. 

So far from being supported by the facts of the case 
or partaking of the spirit of a true faith, this argument 
concerning the temporality of the race, if traced to 
its real source, would be discovered to be the strange 
invention of a certain class of persons who have been 
interested in reviving the hope of personal immortality 
in those who, for various reasons, have abandoned 



80 The Christian Task 

this hope. In abandoning the hope of personal im- 
mortahty, many have clung desperately to the hope 
of social immortality. One of the favorite, though 
mistaken, ways of attempting to win these individuals 
back to a belief in personal immortality has been to try to 
destroy their belief in the eternality of the race and in 
social immortality. Wherever this form of argument 
and method of approach has had any effect at all, the 
effect in the majority of cases has been quite naturally to 
increase skepticism rather than belief. The truth of the 
matter is that many are right in believing In a form of 
social immortality which does not require a correlative 
belief in personal immortality of any kind, and that others 
have erred in overlooking the fact that belief In any form 
of personal immortality must involve a correlative belief 
in some form of social immortality. The proper way of 
proceeding, therefore, would be to regard an earnest belief 
in social immortality, which is obviously the easier belief, 
as a stepping-stone to a real belief In personal Immortality. 
Such it undoubtedly has been In the case of many in- 
dividuals. Such it undoubtedly should be, for fully 
developed faith will never rest satisfied with anything less 
than a belief in the Immortality of the individual as well as 
the race — with anything less than a belief In the possibil- 
ity of eternal personal as well as social salvation. 

It is In Christianity that faith attains Its fullest satis- 
faction — that the possibility of salvation is most com- 
plete. In presenting as its central feature a task which 
promises to last forever, and In supporting with most 
conclusive evidence the belief in the permanence of the 



The Need Satisfied 81 

race and of the individual, Christianity makes a unique 
and unequalled contribution to the ultimate need of the 
age. It insists upon interpreting even death itself as a 
transition to a state where we can enjoy increased activity 
in the interest of the Focial ideal. The resurrection of 
Christ it interprets as a resurrection not to eternal rest, 
but to eternal work. While on earth Jesus labored to make 
this world a better place in which to live, and when he 
went to his Father, he went to prepare a place for us. 
Christians are not only convinced that not even death 
Itself can prevent them from being eternally active in the 
interests of the kingdom of God on earth, but, when they 
once gain an adequate conception of the nature of the 
task which Christianity offers and begin to experience, 
even in a small way, the joy which service for service's sake 
creates, they learn to desire such eternal activity. Thus 
immortality becomes more than a belief — salvation 
more than a possibility. Immortality becomes a living 
and an active hope, salvation a present and an assured 
fact. Through providing us with the strongest supports 
for this hope of immortality and with a task which can 
never play out, Christianity assures us of the possibility 
of eternal salvation as well. Truly it is in Christianity that 
security is made most sure — it is in Christianity that the 
ultimate need of the age finds its fullest satisfaction. 



CHAPTER V 

THE NEED SUMMARIZED: CHRISTIANITY AND 
OTHER RELATED NEEDS 

We have seen how Christianity meets the supreme need 
of the age for a task. It does this by offering to the race 
the work of establishing the kingdom of God on earth. 
This work possesses to an unparalleled degree the char- 
acteristics which enable it to satisfy the need where it is 
already acutely felt and both to create and to satisfy the 
need where the sense of It is not yet keen. Christianity's 
task is big, practical, constructive, cooperative, a task 
which allows for the highest forms of personallsm and 
altruism but which nevertheless must be undertaken 
finally for its own sake, an eternal task. To make the 
performance of this task the chief purpose of existence 
means salvation for both the individual and the race. 
The task is not merely the means to this salvation. It is, 
in a real sense, salvation itself. That is why this task 
must truly be regarded as the supreme need of the age. 

But we have also seen that Christianity offers the race 
something more than a task. It offers, In other words, 
something more than a superior Individual and social 
ideal. It offers the race a task which has already been 
begun, ideals which have already been approached. God 
and his kingdom are the ideals to which Christianity 
points as the goals toward which individual and social 
progress must be made. Christ and his Church are the 
actual historical facts to which Christianity points as the 

82 



The Need Summarized 83 

high-water marks of individual and social development, as 
the way along which the individual and society must 
continue to progress. 

1. A Guide in Our Present Work: The Holy Spirit 

The whole story of Christianity's offer, however, has 
not yet been told. Christianity offers not only a definite 
goal and way of progress. It offers also in the Holy 
Spirit — God immanent in us and in the social order — 
a superior guide to progress. Salvation, individual and 
social, is progress in the company of the Holy Spirit, 
along the way of Christ and his Church, toward the goal 
of God and his kingdom. In offering to the age the task 
of establishing the kingdom of God on earth, Christianity 
offers to it the enjoyment of this supreme companionship 
of the Holy Spirit, who is the efficient guide to steady 
and endless progress and the sure evidence of present 
salvation. 

2. A History of Past Work:' The Bible 

Nor can we stop here. Christianity by no means 
ignores the fact that others besides Christ and the mem- 
bers of the early Church have worked for the establish- 
ment of the kingdom of God on earth. It offers to the age 
the record not only of distinctly Christian experience and 
effort as found in the New Testament, but also of pre- 
Christian experience and effort as found in the Old Testa- 
ment. Christianity was a direct development out of 
Judaism. Both its individual and its social ideals find 
their roots there. It would have been a sorry mistake for 



84 The Christian Task 

Christianity to have refused to retain the record of those 
earlier efforts to realize these ideals. It was a mistake that 
Christianity did not make. In the Christian Bible these 
experiences are preserved. Christianity, in offering the 
race a task, offers it also a magnificent record of the 
experiences of those who have been superior workmen. 
It cannot be doubted but that this fact greatly en- 
hances the value of Christianity's offer. If the age accepts 
the task, it ought also to accept the record. To do other- 
wise would be as foolish as it would have been foolish for 
the United States to have undertaken the construction of 
the Panama Canal without first having become thorough- 
ly acquainted with the results of France's prior attempt. 

3. A Plan for Future Work: A Theology 

No big task is ever undertaken by wise men, moreover, 
without first working out a definite plan of procedure — 
without first making a careful estimate of resources and 
probable cost. Christian theology accomplishes this very 
thing for those who plan to undertake the great task of 
establishing God's kingdom on earth. The work of the 
great Christian theologians, a plan of procedure and an 
estimate of resources, is offered by Christianity to the 
race along with a task. The two should be accepted 
or rejected together. Success cannot follow if they are 
separated. 

This plan or estimate which should be accepted, how- 
ever, is not a definite and unchanging thing. No great 
task would ever be successfully accomplished unless 
original plans were continually altered, unless new esti- 



The Need Summarized 85 

mates were repeatedly made. It is impossible to conceive 
of a successful business man who is not free and able 
to ascertain at any moment the exact relation of his 
resources to his liabilities. In undertaking the work of 
establishing God's kingdom on earth, the age must be 
free and able to do the same. The need is not to accept a 
set and detailed plan or estimate which has been handed 
down from the hoary past. Rather it is to use all the 
materials of the past in working out a more correct esti- 
mate of the present situation and a more appropriate 
plan for the future. 

The chief items in this plan or theology, of course, will 
be much the same as in the past. The Bible must be 
recognized as a chief source for the materials from which 
the theology is to be made. God and his kingdom must 
be recognized as the ends which the individual and society 
seek. The supreme realizations of these two ideals must 
be found in Christ and his Church. The serious con- 
sequences of sin — that is, of the lack of a task which 
can command wholehearted devotion and of the conscious- 
ness of the possession of the means by which such a task 
can be performed — must be taken account of. The Holy 
Spirit, who is at once the guide to happiness and the 
evidence of the presence of salvation, must be given due 
consideration. But the details must be filled in by each 
succeeding generation and by each separate individ- 
ual. Each new age must see to it that the theology 
which it accepts represents a plan for the performance 
of a task which is supremely well suited to its out- 
standing needs. A theology is one of the accompany- 



86 The Christian Task 

ing needs of the age which historic Christianity cannot 
supply in full. Out of the traditional materials handed 
down to us, plus our own individual and social experi- 
ences, we must through the exercise of reason work out 
some plan by which our future activities in the interest 
of God's kingdom on earth can be regulated. 

Is not this just what we have been doing in the entire 
preceding discussion? The result is in some sense a 
theology — a theology which at least begins to meet the 
needs of the writer, and one which, so the writer feels, 
should in some measure meet the need of the age. 

The supreme need ofthe age is for a task big enough to 
appeal strongly to man's sense of infinite capacity for 
service; a task which is practical in the sense that it is a 
serious attempt to satisfy all of man's needs; a task which 
is exclusively constructive; a task which allows men to 
work together to a common end; a task which, while 
allowing for the highest forms of personalism and altruism, 
can be undertaken for its own sake; an eternal task. The 
experience of the War is our finest piece of evidence that 
this need is felt acutely by the present age. While it 
satisfied the need partly and temporarily, the War must 
be regarded as not so much the satisfier as the discoverer 
of the need. Because of it the need is only felt more 
acutely. The nature of the need is such that it is clear 
that only religion can adequately and permanently satisfy 
it; but this must be a religion of activity, a religion of work, 
a religion which can oflFer not only a definite task of the 
kind which the age needs, but also a promise of the means 
necessary for its accomplishment. 



The Need Summarized 87 

Christianity, because of its superior meeting of these 
requirements, can lay just claim to be the final religion. 
This claim, however, must be progressively verified and 
strengthened by increased consciousness of need of all 
kinds and by improved methods of meeting it. It is only 
as the forces of Christianity become more practical, 
constructive, cooperative, and truly altruistic that Christi- 
anity will be recognized to be the final religion of the race. 



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